Bond's creator never really came to terms with the superpower across the water... A timely new book on the 007 phenomenon is reviewed in the NYT:
Winder, the publishing director of Penguin Press in London, capably outlines Fleming’s unsurprising and unsubtle dismissals of 1950s America, which he saw as vulgar and oversexed, enthralled by an ever expanding consumer culture. The book doesn’t say whether he was aware before his death, in 1964, that critics on both sides of the Atlantic had made precisely the same observations about his own work (and the ensuing films).
Comments