Ian Fleming’s original novels in the Fifties might have been intended by the author as fairly straight thrillers, but in fact they were dazzlingly baroque. The villains had an uncanny, sinister fairy-tale quality: Le Chiffre with his blank “doll-like” eyes; Hugo Drax, who physically resembles a Black Forest ogre; Blofeld in the Alps, wearing emerald green contact lenses to protect his eyes from the glare, but which make him look like the Devil. The jeopardy in the novels was often barking mad: in Dr No, Bond gets into an underwater fight with a giant squid; in You Only Live Twice, he is threatened with a molten mud enema. Fleming was always keen to steer away from the Cold War; he believed it wouldn’t last. And the Bond films of the Sixties and Seventies captured that outlandish spirit.