1st Edition
The Bondian Cold War The Transnational Legacy of a Cultural Icon
James Bond, Ian Fleming’s irrepressible and ubiquitous ‘spy,’ is often understood as a Cold Warrior, but James Bond’s Cold War diverged from the actual global conflict in subtle but significant ways.
That tension between the real and fictional provides perspectives into Cold War culture transcending ideological and geopolitical divides. The Bondiverse is complex and multi-textual, including novels, films, video games, and even a comic strip, and has also inspired an array of homages, copies, and competitors. Awareness of its rich possibilities only becomes apparent through a multi-disciplinary lens.
The desire to consider current trends in Bondian studies inspired a conference entitled ‘The Bondian Cold War,’ convened at Tallinn University, Estonia in June 2019. Conference participants, drawn from three continents and multiple disciplines – film studies, history, intelligence studies, and literature, as well as intelligence practitioners – offered papers on the literary and cinematic aspects of the ‘spy’, discussed fact versus fiction in the Bond canon, went in search of a global Bond, and pondered gender and sexuality across the Bondiverse.
This volume of essays inspired by that conference, suitable for students, researchers, and anyone interested in Cold War culture, makes vital contributions to understanding Bond as a global phenomenon, across traditional divisions of East and West, and beyond the end of the Cold War from which he emerged.
Introduction: Taking the Bondian Cold War seriously
Martin D. Brown, Ronald J. Granieri and Muriel Blaive
Part I: The Bondian Cold War
1. The Bondian Cold War: The Business of Ambiguity
Martin D. Brown
2. Bond Re-Bourne: Transatlantic Translations of Espionage Heroism in the Bond Era
Ronald J. Granieri
3. ‘No James Bonds in This Business’: The Sandbaggers (ITV, 1978-80) and the Evolution of the ‘anti-Bond’
Joseph Oldham
4. James Bond and the Subterranean Cold War: Materiality, Strategy and Volume in the Underworld
Klaus Dodds and Lisa Funnell
Part II: Fact versus Fiction
5. Bond and the Archives
Gill Bennett
6. Interview with Avner Avraham, Former Mossad Operative
Ron Fogel
7. James Bond, Ian Fleming and Intelligence: Breaking Down the Boundary Between the ‘Real’ and the ‘Imagined’
Trevor McCrisken and Christopher Moran
Part III: Global Bond: Behind the Curtain
8. Vladimir Lenin as James Bond: The Fiction of Zoya Voskresenskaya-Rybkina
Filip Kovacevic
9. Agent Rising in the Reich – The Shield and the Sword: A Forgotten Classic among Soviet Intelligence Films and What It Can Tell Us about Why the Soviet Union Could Not Go Bond
Tarik Cyril Amar
10. A Soviet 007 Fighting Fascism in the West? Soviet Internationalism and the Real and Imagined Lives of Agents in Savva Kulish’s The Dead Season (Mertvyi Sezon, 1968)
Karsten Brüggemann
11. Into the Heartland – Bond Joins the Jihad
Arne Segelke
Part IV: Of Human Bondage: Gender, Sexuality and the Spy
12. 'You Can Bet He’s Reading One of Those Ian Fleming Thrillers': James, Jack, and American Cold War Masculinity
Tanfer Emin Tunc
13. 'Like a Party-Political Broadcast for You-Know-Who': Margaret Thatcher and the Reception of Octopussy (1983).
Stephanie Jones and Claire Hines
14. Concluding Essay: James Bond Will Return
Ronald J. Granieri, Martin D. Brown and Muriel Blaive
Biography
Martin D. Brown, F.R.Hist.S., is a diplomatic historian at Richmond American University. Between 2018 and 2019, he was Lead Researcher at the Centre of Excellence in Intercultural Studies, Tallinn University. His publications include Slovakia in History (2011), and ‘Executors or creative deal-makers? The role of the diplomats in the making of the Helsinki CSCE’, with Dr Angela Romano (2019).
Ronald J. Granieri is Professor of History at the United States Army War College and Director of the Center for the Study of America and the West at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. His publications include The Ambivalent Alliance: Konrad Adenauer, the CDU/CSU, and the West, 1949–1966 (2003).
Muriel Blaive is a historian of Czech communism and post-communism. She is currently Elise Richter Fellow at Graz University. She edited a special issue of East Central Europe on “Surveillance of Culture, Culture of Surveillance” (October 2022), and of East European Politics and Societies on “Writing on Communist History” (August 2022).
