Licensed to feel: The new James Bond fusses over furnishings and sprinkles talc

First, an appalling admission: I have never read any of Ian Fleming’s Bond books. Nor have I read any of anybody else’s, the number of which seems to grow with each passing year. For a civilised man of a certain age this is a shameful oversight, given that I have seen all but three of the 23 films in the cinema, many of them at the Odeon, Leicester Square within days of their opening; that I can’t put on a dinner jacket without wondering whether Sean Connery would look better in it; and that I still own a copy, on 7” vinyl, of ‘Nobody Does It Better’ by Carly Simon, the theme tune to The Spy Who Loved Me. (And the soundtrack it came from, just in case the single went missing.)

But if you are going to start somewhere, why not start here, with William Boyd’s entry in the series? As it happens, I have read quite a lot of Boyd, who can be a bit of a lifesaver for those of us who read literary fiction but cannot altogether repress an atavistic yearning for plot. A civilised man of an even more certain age, Boyd turns out to be a Fleming fanboy of the first water. On some level, you suspect, he has been sitting there for 30 years waiting for someone to ring up and ask him to write a James Bond novel. His historical spy novel Restless could almost be his audition tape.

Boyd’s Bond, then, is set in 1969, in and around something vaguely resembling the Biafran War. Bond has just celebrated his 45th birthday by staying overnight at the Dorchester and drinking and smoking too much. An attractive woman flirts with him in the lift. The first of many dishes of scrambled eggs is eaten.