What the Russians thought of James Bond in the 1960s

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.