Faculty of Arts talk:

Dr James Chapman
Why should we take James Bond seriously?

This talk places the fictional character of Ian Fleming’s James Bond into the historical contexts of British politics, culture and society from the 1950s to the present.

The Bond novels and films have all too frequently been dismissed as mere entertainments, hardly worth being put under the microscope of serious scholarly enquiry.

However, the application of historical method demonstrates what an understanding of the historical context can reveal about these massively popular cultural artefacts, and what an analysis of the books and films themselves reveals about the times in which they were made.

James Bond can be placed at the nexus of a number of related historical debates, including the decline of Britain as a great power, the post war shift from austerity to affluence, sexual liberation and changing attitudes towards class – themes at the centre of many debates in the study of contemporary British history.

James Chapman is a member of the History Department at the Open University and in 1999 he published Licence To Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films.

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