The title of this book initially took me aback and aroused my worst fears. I worried that it would be an over-intellectual history of what is, after all, a Hollywood movie franchise. As a huge James Bond fan—and, let's face it, the films are a large part of the reason I studied intelligence in the first place—I had watched all the movies but had never read anything academic on the subject. Thankfully, my concerns were short-lived; the book is great and offers a wide variety of angles on what the editors refer to as the “Bondian Cold War,” none of which takes anything away from the shallow, simplistic joy of the series!
The book is based on papers presented at a conference held in Tallinn in 2019. Additional chapters were also added. The organizers of the conference, now the book's editors, wisely opted to take a multinational, multidisciplinary approach to...