James Bond

By Tim Lusher The Queen, a five-part series starting next Sunday, focuses on crisis moments since the 1953 coronation. Emilia Fox stars in the first episode, centred around events in 1955 when Princess Margaret was considering marriage to a divorced equerry, Peter Townsend. Samantha Bond, best know...

By Mark Brown The original Johnny English offered an energetic spoof of the James Bond franchise, casting Atkinson as an accident-prone British agent. The hero was partly based on a character Atkinson played in a series of TV commercials for Barclays bank in the 1990s, though it also contained aspect...

Age: 84. I know her. She was Bond girl Pussy Galore, a former trapeze artist turned aviator, in Goldfinger in 1964. Rolled about in the hay with Sean Connery while he taught her to forget that she'd been a lesbian in the novel. What a memory you have. And now the Bond girl has become a caped avenger.

By Steve Rose The roles practically line themselves up: Frankenstein's monster, Lurch from the Addams Family, the Incredible Hulk. There are no more Lord of the Rings movies but there must be room for him on the forthcoming Hobbit. And he'd be the perfect successor to Kiel in a Bond movie. You can already p...

By David Adam Victor is a heavyweight policy analyst, but one of his most impressive academic feats could have been to smuggle the name of the world's favourite secret agent into the sober pages of the Oxford Review of Economic Policy. "Geoengineering may not require any collective international eff...

In one of his later books, Kolymsky Heights (1994), Davidson had Dr Johnny Porter, a part-Gitxsan anthropologist-cum-CIA agent from British Columbia, infiltrated into an isolated Soviet scientific station in the Arctic, from which – because research into the discovery of a frozen,...

By John Patterson Elsewhere, there's Sylvia, in which Gwyneth Paltrow, the Norma Shearer of our time (that's NOT a compliment), essays the suicidal first Mrs Ted Hughes. But since the second Mrs H also did herself in, perhaps the one they should be making movies about is Hughes himself – especially since th...

By Sam Jones After making his name by poking blood-red contact lenses into his eyes and false fangs into his gums for a series of Hammer Horror films, Lee went on to play the urbane laird of the pagan manor in The Wicker Man and the bounteously nippled, bling-packing assassin Francisco Scaramanga in th...

By Patrick Barkham Since Pinewood Studios were built nearly 75 years ago in secluded Iver Heath, just west of London, this mix of sheds, underwater pools and enormous blue screens behind a quaint, half-timbered gatehouse has spawned hundreds of much-loved films, from David Lean's Oliver Twist to Batman...

By Ben Child Since then, matters have spiralled into even more of a fug at Lucasfilm, with the most recent Star Wars big-screen venture, a teaser for the new animated series, meeting with critical and commercial apathy. This from a series which stands as one of the highest-grossing of all time, behind...

By Emma Sibbles NeonFrom tie-dyed dresses at Blumarine to eye-popping fluoro bangles at Diane Von Furstenburg, neon was the alternative to the pretty pastels also fighting for catwalk space last month. Balenciaga's bright orange, green or yellow leather biker leggings really popped, while at Marc b...

By Xan Brooks McIntee takes it further still. "There's a strange twist at the end of Aliens, in that Weaver almost becomes the villain. The queen just wants to do what's best for her offspring. Ripley is like the evil stepmother who wants to kill the children."

By Adam Dawtrey Other notable entries among the 34 nominated projects include Hamish McColl and Paul King's Paddington Bear script for Warner Bros, Dan Mazer's comedy Eurovision for Working Title, Terry Gilliam and Tony Grisoni's long-awaited The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, Jonathan Glazer's Unde...

By Saptarshi Ray Hiaasen should be gold dust for producers and directors such as the Coens, Steven Soderbergh, Brian Singer or George Clooney. He should be as bankable as Stephen King, John Grisham, Philip K Dick or Michael Crichton. Surely there is enough talent in the film world to be up to the task – if a nov...

By Andy Bull WICKET! Bopara 31 lbw Bond (35th over: England 117-9) Bopara goes, trapped in front of middle stump by Bond. Oh what a bloody shambles. That was a disgustingly awful ball, that hardly got above ankle-height as it jagged back from off stump and thumped into Bopara's pad in front of leg stump. He...

By Ben Child Unlike Bond creator Ian Fleming, Deighton is still going strong. At the height of his writing success in 1967 he wrote Len Deighton's London Dossier, a guide book to swinging-60s London on a "secret agent" theme. He has also published several cookery volumes, including his Action Cook Boo...

By John Patterson North By Northwest has been called the first James Bond movie (screenwriter Ernest Lehman called it "the ultimate Hitchcock picture" while he was writing it, but no matter). And the similarities are evident. In 1960 Hitchcock himself briefly considered directing Thunderball. Ian Flemi...

By Xan Brooks, Jason Solomons The name is Solomons, Jason Solomons and this week Jason celebrates the world's most powerful film franchise, Bond. To mark the centenary of the birth of the series' larger than life producer, Cubby Broccoli, BFI Southbank is running a season of Bond movies. Jason talks to Cubby's daughte...

By Ben Child But the latest 007, Daniel Craig, proves the most lethal of all. The two women he beds in his first Bond movie, Casino Royale, are both murdered, while a conquest in new film Quantum of Solace is covered in oil in a homage to Masterson's demise in Goldfinger.