Last year I wrote a piece about James Bond for the ‘Freelance’ column of the Times Literary Supplement. All true Bond lovers — of the novels, I mean — know that he lived in a ‘comfortable flat in a plane-tree’d square off the King’s Road’, as Ian Fleming described it in Moonraker. Further internal evidence in Thunderball indubitably established that it was Wellington Square — but there was considerable mystery and doubt about exactly which house contained the Bond apartment. In my article I claimed to have identified it as No. 25, based on a certain amount of sleuthing and, I thought, convincing circumstantial evidence.
No. 25 Wellington Square was the house owned by Desmond MacCarthy, a key member of the Bloomsbury Group, a colleague of Fleming’s on the Sunday Times (where Fleming was the general manager), a fellow Old Etonian (they also had close mutual friends) and a legendary host. There was every possibility that Fleming had been to one, if not several, of MacCarthy’s soirées. There were other clues, based on Fleming’s descriptions of Bond’s flat, that tallied neatly with the house (I myself had actually once been to No. 25). I also remarked that just across the King’s Road was Bywater Street, where John le Carré had situated George Smiley’s London home, at No. 9. What a coincidence!
Thus far, thus so footlingly literary. But to my total astonishment this TLS piece was picked up and commented on globally. The story of the location of Bond’s flat appeared in dozens of newspapers around the world and on countless websites. It demonstrated unequivocally not just that the James Bond myth was alive and well but also that people were still fascinated by this type of arcana in places such as Djakarta, Gdansk and Rio de Janiero.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in