JAMES BOND in the 1980S
June 1983 Marxism Today 37 Casino Royale, the first Bond novel, was It is no accident that the Daily Express published in 1953 when, as David Cannadine serialized this particular novel, in which has observed, the coronation celebrations Bond is pitted against the Soviet espionage provided 'a retrospectively unconvincing organisation SMERSH, as, in the late reaffirmation of Britain's continued world JAMES BOND 1950s, Bond functioned primarily as a power status'. The last of Fleming's IN THE 1980s political hero for the lower middle classes. novels, The Man with the Golden Gun, An exemplary figure of the cold war era, appeared in 1965, the year of Churchill's Tony Bennett he personified the virtues of Western funeral, 'self-consciously recognised as the individualism, effortlessly triumphing over requiem for Britain as a great power'.1 the leaden hand of Soviet bureaucracy. The same period also witnessed a Equally important, particularly after the gradual relaxation in the relations between Suez fiasco and humiliation, Bond offered East and West as the acute tensions of the an imaginary outlet for a historically cold war period gave way to the less scene — a case of history repeating itself blocked jingoism. His exploits — warding troubled atmosphere of detente. There that would be farcical were it not so tragic. off the communist threat to world peace had been significant changes in the sphere Great power illusions have been kicked single-handedly, reducing the USA, in the ol gender and sexual relations, too. In the into a macabre half-life again in the person of Felix Leiter, to the role of 'permissive society' of the early 1960s, aftermath of the Falklands crisis.
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