Spy story

James Bond: the spy who bored me

Andrew Parker, the head of MI5, says James Bond’s glamorous adventures are “distant from reality”. Real-life British spies, he insists, are just “ordinary people who live in our communities”.

Perhaps Ian Fleming should have made his thrillers a little more mundane…

Bond burst through the door and opened fire. His first victim slumped to the floor; his second gave a grunt, as if he’d been punched in the guts, and toppled like a sack of wet sand. The third man, however, had vanished from view. Bond took cover behind a pillar. Silence. All was still. If he could just—