Kim Sherwood and David Lowbridge-Ellis celebrate 70 Years of Bond by getting together with an audience to talk all things Fleming.

Written in haste so it could be released in advance of the Coronation of King Charles, there were concerns that Higson’s ‘fast show’ of a novel might not manage to keep the Bondian end up. But what could be more appropriate for 007 than a race against time?

Diamonds Are Forever has had some of the series’ finest covers. The latest edition, published to mark 70 years of Bond being in print, is no exception. But it’s also a twist with tradition, taking things in an aptly deadly direction. Looks like I’m going to have to find more space on my shelves… and hopefully not a new husband.

Despite me being British, sport has always bored me to tears. So imagine my surprise when I found myself bawling my eyes out with pride in our sportspeople twice in one day! Perhaps their Bond-like approach to overcoming adversity had something to do with it?

Bond asking Tracy to marry him is one of the most rapturously romantic scenes in cinema history. Its modesty and gender equality subvert what we expect from a traditional marriage proposal. Without me realising until now, I think it may have influenced my own…

I’ve yet to find anyone who thinks having Noel Coward play Dr. No would have been even a vaguely good idea, and that included the man himself. So what did Ian Fleming see in Coward - friend, neighbour, best man, godfather to his son - which the rest of us have missed?

You would think that a film which opens with three men pretending to be blind would alert us to the need to look at things differently. But six decades of straight-washing has obscured quite how queer Bond’s beginnings were - and still are to this day. It’s high time we took the blinkers off: Bond was born this way.

Bond purists might baulk but the best Martinis in the world are neither shaken nor stirred. Just ask the experts at Dukes in London, where Ian Fleming preferred to drink them.

No sooner has Bond arrived in Venice than he’s hitting the watering holes. Bond works his way up from a favourite haunt of Ernest Hemingway to the finest the floating city has to offer. And then the real drinking begins. But what do the drinks that Bond chooses reveal about him as a man?

M’s poetry reading is one of Skyfall’s most gripping and memorable scenes, imbuing the film with a sense of what Winston Churchill would have termed ‘buggering on’. It also contains a tragic gay love story, mostly forgotten about (or hidden) for nearly 200 years.

There’s much more to Miss Case than meets the eye, regardless of whichever hair piece she happens to be wearing at any given time. Jack Bell takes Tiffany’s own advice and keeps it original, finding fascinating new insights into the character and the actress who brought her to indelible life: Jill St. John.