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This book presents an insightful and thoroughly entertaining exploration of the political context of the Bond books and films. Jeremy Black offers a historian's interpretation from the perspective of the late 2010s, assessing James Bond in terms of the greatly changing world order of the Bond years - a lifetime that stretches from 1953, when the first novel appeared, to the present. Black argues that the Bond novels - the Fleming books as well as the often-neglected novels authored by others after Fleming died in 1964 - and films drew on current fears in order to reduce the implausibility of the villains and their villainy.The novels and films also presented potent images of national character, explored the rapidly changing relationship between a declining Britain and an ascendant United States, charted the course of the Cold War and the subsequent post-1990 world, and offered an evolving but always potent demonology.