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“... when we thought we wanted him? This is not quite the way the publicity for Skyfall, directed by Sam Mendes, has been running, but the makers of the film have in principle understood both the delusion and the question. Craig has said in an interview that he thought it was a mistake not to allow Bond to be funny, and that the new film would be ...”

“... About​ two thirds of the way into Spectre, James Bond (Daniel Craig) is tied to a chair in the desert crater headquarters of Franz Oberhauser (Christoph Waltz), the head of Spectre and by coincidence both the son and the murderer of a man who took the young Bond under his wing. Oberhauser is operating a contraption that threatens to deprive Bond of his facial recognition abilities by driving a pair of pins into the sides of his skull – a painful operation in its initial stages, as indicated by Craig’s grimacing and an uncontained scream ...”

“... 1960s; and in film versions and revivals, the comfort is doubled as we recognise the famous tunes. Sam Mendes can frighten us with syphilitic dancers and Nazi flags, but the music tells us that everything is all right. The 1960s and early 1970s were also the era of the enormous movie musical. There is a clear difference between stage musicals and their ...”

“... on closer inspection, to be mostly about men. In the glass of fashion, however, all is reversed. Mendes and de la Haye write in their introduction that fashion is ‘an indicator of individual, group and sexual identity’ whose ‘fluidity reflects shifts in the social matrix’; yet of the 280 illustrations that follow, nearly 250 are of women. High ...”

“... hardly believe his luck. (The story had a sequel at Namibian independence ten years later, when Sam Nujoma’s Swapo guerrillas were supposed to be confined to their camps for the duration of the first free election. Mugabe advised Nujoma to do exactly as he had done and infiltrate his guerrillas into the villages. The South African army, far less squeamish ...”