This episode contains potential spoilers for all the James Bond films and books, so, if by some miraculous turn of events you have managed to avoid them all for the last sixty years, go watch them and then come back! If not, thank you for tuning in and enjoy!Also, a quick little trigger warning, we will be discussing 9/11 and its aftermath.James Bond has been a staple of British literary and cinematic culture for the past 59 years. He has undergone a slow, steady, evolution into the modern world, carrying with him the luggage of his Cold War origins and a need to remain relevant. He has always been a kind of mouthpiece for the political and cultural issues faced by Britain and America throughout his emphatically consistent cinematic career. Beginning as a figurehead of resurgent British power in the years of economic downturn following the Second World War, becoming the icon of Britain’s Cold War, through the American War on Drugs, the fears of seemingly omnipotent media moguls, and internal threats, Bond has been brought firmly into the modern world, standing against terrorism and biological- and cyber-warfare. He is, and always has been, a product of the sixties constantly adapting to whatever threat his real-world, modernising nation needed him to face.

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