Simon Winder
I haven’t watched a Bond film in years, but to an American kid growing up in the 60’s - the kiid that I once was - James Bond was the very definition of cool sophistication. To a British kid, though, as Simon Winder tells us in this quirky, enjoyable memoir, 007 was something else entirely. Bond was, Winder says, Britain’s manhood, the icon that kept Englishmen’s faith in England alive from the hardscrabble post-war years through the subsequent loss of empire all the way into the economic doldrums of the ’70s. It’s a serious thesis, played for laughs in this very funny book that manages to cover the Bond novels, the movies, Ian Fleming’s life and a good chunk of late 20th Century British history.