Carry on, Mister Bond

We will perhaps never know whether the Prime Minister stirs Benzedrine into his champagne "with a scrap of toast, so that the white powder whirled among the bubbles" in the manner of James Bond after his famous greedy dinner with M in Moonraker, but it is interesting to note that each man is, in addition to being pitched in single combat with World Evil, an old boy of Fettes College, that Loire-cum-Hammer Edinburgh public school in whose forecourt the statue of a monstrous brazen soldier dies immovably, below him inscribed the motto, hortatory and involuntarily camp, "CARRY ON".

Bond has carried on wonderfully for more than 50 years, in spite of his creator's growing distaste, familiar to the exhausted begetter of prodigies - Holmes, Morse, maybe one day Potter.

I seem to remember that Bond, like Ian Fleming and Captain Hook (sadistically sexy in his own way) was also an Etonian, but had to leave; something about a boy's maid. The lamentably out-of-print James Bond Dossier by Kingsley Amis is tenderly illuminating as only Amis can be as to the underparts of Bond's psychology. More recently, we've had a pithy, playful anthology from the scholarly Simon Winder, who has assembled a selection of nuggets that Bond fanatics may amuse themselves by sourcing. His introduction is, like his book, all too short and far too well-behaved - he won't give away plot lines for fear of spoiling new read-ers' pleasure, although surely the book is for Bond enthusiasts who, I believe correctly, see these plot lines for the creaking excuses for decoration they are. Anyhow, it's a treat, and, like all anthologies, sends one rushing thirsty to the primary source.

And how thirsty! What excuse can there be for Penguin's reissue of these 15 books? They are of unexampled viciousness in most of the deadliest of the seven sins. There's little or no sloth, unless you count fatness as a manifestation of it, and then, no one good is fat, except maybe Bond's housekeeper, the treasure May, who is, being a Scot of the working class, absolutely sound, and despises yoghurt.

The feasts beat Keats, they beat Petronius, they beat even Brideshead, written, as Evelyn Waugh made plain in his introduction to the later editions, at a time when things were grey and dry and belts were tight. But these books were written when Britain had never had it so good, when the life of the body was returning after all that death had wrought upon the spirit in war.

The drinks are incessant, Parnassian, described with a gloating fetishism that attends all appetites and every object upon which Fleming dwells in the books. From this luxurious commodification it may be possible to gauge the austerity of the upper-class Scots nursery in the last century's early years. With what rivers of appropriately presented alcohol are his characters refreshed.

Even Tiffany Case, of Diamonds are Forever, who, although she was sent to AA after a nasty gang-rape put her off men and onto the sauce, orders a stinger with white crème de menthe after three martinis and some peachy bumpers of Clicquot Rosé when dining with the spy who is later to love her.

How can this be? Very easily. Just as the old Aga Khan said that he could drink champagne without offending his faith on account of the substance's transformation into kingly spirit as he quaffed it, Tiffany's drinks are libations, ichor, preparations for the happy sacrifice she was prepared by her maker to become ever since her black knickers "whipped at the senses" of the spy with something cruel in his eyes who will yet love her and in so doing anneal her pain.

It's magical stuff, meretricious, meditatedly and engagedly violent, fantastically snobbish, worldly to the last drop of a name, lazily anti- American, casually racist about blacks, Jews, Japanese ("once a Jap, always a Jap"), grotesquely preoccupied with the signals of sado-masochism, and as obsessed with machines and breasts as FHM.

Bond has no faith but his country and the morality of the hillside. Yet, what word accompanies his couplings with them, the weapon-breasted bevy of hotly-named girls? It's always "love". There's the usual grand respect for Germans in spite of it all and some descriptions of nature that recall another glamourpuss obsessed by death, Alan Clark.