Bond wasn’t British until Connery played the role. In the novels he was English and had an incipid racist dislike of the Scots and Welsh. He was also a misogynist and a homohobe. He was also pretty much a cowardly assassin. He was supposed to look like the American songwriter Hoagy Carmichael. Initially the tv series Danger Man was going to be an Ian Fleming-weitten Bond TV series at the end of the 1950s with Patrick McGoohan as Bond until McGoohan seemed to politically object to playing the character. Bond’s characterisation has always altered. (A good book to read about all this is John Higgs’ excellent Love and Let Die.)

Today Bond has the ability to be reshaped by the current dominant culture to try and reflect how the UK sees itself. There’s no surprise that because we struggle to define what British is, defining a contemporary Bond is equally difficult. Becomes part of the culture wars.

A solution (possibly cop-out) I’d like to see is for a new Bond movie (or TV series) to be set immediately after World War Two and present him in much the way he’s depicted in the Casino Royale and Live and Let Die novels: late thirties, scar across his cheek, cruel mouth, skin grafts and all. I thought the recent Ripley adaptation was good and they way I’d like to see Bond go.