Back to basics: a legend is born

FOREVER AND A DAY: A James Bond Novel ★★★★ by Anthony Horowitz Jonathan Cape, £18.99

‘BUT that is the arrogance of the British. You are a tiny island with bad weather and bad food also but you still think you rule the world… were it not for your geographical location and your friendship… kinship with Europe, you would be irrelevant already.”

Sixty-five years after James Bond first took on the world’s biggest villains in the pages of Ian Fleming’s masterpiece Casino Royale, 007 is back.

The quote above might suggest Bond is getting a lecture from European Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker but they are the words of a ruthless man mountain called Scipio.

Author Horowitz, brandishing his licence to write a second Bond thriller after Trigger Mortis, admits that issues such as Brexit were on his mind as he wrote. So Scipio’s early appearance as a gigantic, bloated threat to Britain’s wellbeing sounds like a metaphor for the overblown EU as a whole. Either that or I’ve worked for the Daily Express for too long.

Forever And A Day is set in the early 1950s before the first Bond novel Casino Royale and it reveals how Bond became a cold-blooded killing machine in the 00-section.

We see him experience both sides of the French Riviera: murky Marseille and magical Monte Carlo. And he gets to grips with his first Bond “girl”, an older, sophisticated femme fatale called Sixtine who, reflecting the modern-day #MeToo movement, gives bed-hopping Bond a lesson in consent.

In between the exciting high drama, deadly double-crossing and heavy violence, she also finds time to introduce him to his favourite cigarettes and preferred method for mixing his drinks.

Despite the odd tweak Horowitz stays loyal to the fabulous Fleming formula. And for that he surely deserves another mission guiding the fortunes of the world’s favourite superspy.