He means his cock(tail): Shaken - Drinking with James Bond & Ian Fleming

If you're a) a fan of James Bond and/or Ian Fleming, b) are nurturing or have fully developed an expensive dependence on obscure alcoholic drinks, and c) can read, then good news: the mixologists at London's sexy booze dungeon Bar Swift have only gone and compiled a book of Bond-based cocktail recipes just for you! It's called Shaken: Drinking with James Bond & Ian Fleming, and while it should probably have added the disclaimer "(not literally)" to its title, it is nevertheless a fine-looking addition to your library / bar / downstairs toilet.

Endorsed by Ian Fleming Publications (which is about as official as you can get without Barbara Broccoli coming round and licking it), Shaken is the first book to seriously investigate James Bond's crippling booze habit in such an entertaining, thirst-inducing way. Its major selling point is the forty original recipes conjured up by the Swift guys, but its cheeky twist is the way it ties these recipes into Ian Fleming's world. Each drink is followed by a selection of relevant quotes from the Bond books and other assorted bits of Fleming's writing, with a garnish of trivia that begs to be picked apart by awful Bond pedants (don't look at page 23 if glaring errors in Bond lore make you do a shit).

As you'd hope, there's some stunning photography and delightful illustrations accompanying all those boozy, Bondy words, and a cursory flick through in the Food & Drink section of Waterstones will be enough to send you straight to the nearest 'spoons for their approximation of a Vesper (good luck). But this is, first and foremost, a cocktail recipe book, so let's talk cocktail recipes.

Side note: among the many, many ways in which I am exactly like James Bond is my health-threatening relationship with fancy grog. My sideboard groans under the weight of fifty-odd bottles of random spirits I've picked up over the years in the misguided belief that I won't drink two shots of each and then decide I don't like it. So it was with a justifiable sense of preparedness that I parted this book's pages, ready and willing to whip up as many of its recipes as I could with my unnecessarily large selection of boozy booty. And this is where Shaken gets a bit shaky.

"You know, that's not half bad. I'm gonna have to think up a name for that.

I know! I shall call it SEXY FUCKJUICE"

As well as the forty original recipes, there are ten more for some of the "standard" cocktails that feature heavily in Fleming's books: the Martini, the Negroni, the Daiquiri, the Old Fashioned, blah blah blah. I've mixed a million of these. If you haven't, you can google those recipes in seconds. But of the forty new drinks, I was visibly distressed to discover that my extensive collection of weird and wonderful alcohol allowed me to make... four. (Of those four, I've so far made three, and to be fair they were all delicious - in fact there is a Blofeld just to my left, sheeing me through writing thish posht.) So unless you work behind the bar at the Savoy or are Gerry from Gerry's of Soho, the chances of you getting much practical use out of Shaken as a cocktail recipe book are slimmer than a straw full of slimline tonic water.

Maybe I'm being presumptuous. Maybe you've got loads of mastiha liqueur, yellow chartreuse, velvet falernum or Branca Menta knocking about next to your Aldi gin and that Smirnoff you picked up on the way back from Corfu, in which case great, enjoy this book! But even you can probably forget knocking out a round of Kissy Suzukis unless you've got plenty of Unkai Nayuta No Toki buckwheat shochu and Akashi-Tai Shiraume Ginjo Umeshu in. In its defence, Shaken does tell you how to make some of its peculiar ingredients at home, but I'm just not sure how many of us have the time or the inclination to throw together a batch of rooibos syrup in order to mix a Dr No (assuming you've also got some kind of gentian liqueur handy, which the recipe also calls for).

So it's hard to wholeheartedly recommend this book, even as a 007 fan who loves a cocktail or three while rambling on the internet of a Wednesday evening. It's certainly a lovely thing, curated with an obvious passion for Bond and with due deference to fans, especially those who love the books as much as the films: the inspirations for some of the drinks (the Trueblood, the Dreamy Pines) are hugely rewarding for the most devoted among us. And if you don't mind not being able to make most of the drinks on offer, it's still a fun read and a classy piece of Bondiana. But a good cocktail book shouldn't feel exclusive to its audience, and if you're not a patholigical collector of pretentiously-packaged liquid intoxicants then it's difficult not to see Shaken as a somewhat mis-marketed product.

Forever And A Day:Bond begins (again)

Just a week after Ron Howard's self-defeatingly unnecessary Star Wars prequel Solo limped into cinemas, Anthony Horowitz's James Bond continuation novel Forever And A Day - set before the events of Ian Fleming's first 007 book Casino Royale - arrives bearing another origin story for a 20th century pop culture hero. The timing, of course, is coincidental, but the result is identical: a serviceable but weak yarn that might have passed muster if only numerous other entries in the series weren't vastly more impressive. Both Han Solo and James Bond deserve better.

Ant: man

There's definitely a great Casino Royale prequel to be written, and it doesn't need to cover every event in Bond's formative days that led to him becoming the cold, ruthless, state-sanctioned psychopath we know and love. To his credit, Horowitz realises this and avoids Phantom Menace-ing Bond, but the result swings a little too far the other way. You could fillet out every reference to Bond's pre-double-0 duty in Forever And A Day without much impact on the word count, and it would appear for all intents and purposes like any other Bond novel. It's almost as if the character needs no introduction.

It's a shame Horowitz didn't choose to cover Bond's WWII exploits; there's probably a cracking war story to be told that includes his rise from lieutenant to commander in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve that doesn't follow all the predictable beats of every other Bond book. I'd also love to see a fully fleshed-out account of the two assassinations Bond undertook in order to be elevated to double-0 status, and to which Fleming briefly and tantalisingly alludes in Casino Royale (nerd note: these were covered in John Pearson's 1973 book The Authorised Biography of 007, but that seems well outside the canon now. Also it's not very good). Horowitz obliges me with a few pages devoted to the latter of those jobs, but it's a cursory bit of connective tissue before the thrust of his own story gets underway.

That thrust is this: the newly-promoted James Bond assumes the code number 007 after its previous (unnamed) owner, who was in the middle of an investigation of unexplained goings-on in the heroin trade, inconveniently rocks up dead in the south of France. Bond sets out to finish whatever his predecessor started, with the added objective of a little payback for the death of 007.1. Grotesque villains, beautiful women, casinos, car chases, explosions, sex, violence and betrayal all follow, just as they always do, and surprises are few and far between. The only way you won't spot the final chapter's "twist" coming from at least the halfway mark is if this is your first ever book.

Oh God James Bond's going to die, he's going to die!

Horowitz writes well enough to keep you reading without getting bored, but his is not a particularly entertaining style. His attempts to emulate Ian Fleming are admirable - the detail with which he describes certain objects or places is almost as exhaustive as Fleming, and there's a great deal of evocative authenticity in his writing  - but you never get the feeling that he's as deep under Bond's skin as the character's creator was. There are brief references here to the way Bond feels about taking a life (which shifts significantly by the story's end), and a weird amount of reflection on the vulgarity of excessive wealth (specifically cruise liners), but Fleming poured so much of himself into Bond that you genuinely felt you were reading about a three-dimensional person, rather than the franchise icon of Forever And A Day. At least that title would have pleased Fleming, being as it is entirely meaningless and crowbarred into the story with minimal justification.

Where Horowitz succeeds is with his version of the Bond Girl: Sixtine, as she's mysteriously called, is a competent, independent woman who's more than a match for Bond and who approaches their relationship entirely on her own terms. She's never a damsel in distress and she teaches Bond a thing or two about a thing or two, which is refreshing to read. Bond first encounters her playing blackjack in Monte Carlo, in a great little vignette that tells you much about both characters with wit and efficiency.

Sadly that fire doesn't spread to any of the other characters: there are two major villains and neither of them are remotely memorable. Horowitz has one of them, a hideously obese Corsican gangster, speak via an emotionless translator, an unnecessary choice which prevents the reader connecting with the bad guy in any meaningful way. And as for the villains' evil scheme, it's lifted wholesale from one of the Bond films and makes even less sense here than it did there. Keep your eyes peeled too for echoes of Quantum Of Solace (spy business set against the backdrop of a performance of Tosca) and Skyfall (a villain's interrogation of a bound Bond that challenges his sexuality, albeit briefly and inconsequentially).

So the quest for a truly worthy successor to Ian Fleming continues: this is Anthony Horowitz's second Bond assignment (following 2015's criminally-titled Trigger Mortis), effectively rendering him the authorial equivalent of a double-0, but it's hard to get excited about any future missions bearing his signature. His style, which often borders on the prosaic (one major character's demise is described in literally the shortest, simplest way possible), is ideal for the younger audience of his Alex Rider books, but for the grown-ups who look to the literary Bond for the meat that's missing from the cinematic version of the character, it's a little on the lean side.

TV Corner: Fleming

With a depressing 625 days still to go before the release of the 24th James Bond film, fans of the world's greatest secret agent are seeking a fix to satisfy their filthy habit. Fortunately, that fix is about to arrive in the shape of the criminally underrated Dominic Cooper as James Bond's creator Ian Fleming, in a new four-part miniseres from Sky Atlantic called, with devilish cunning, Fleming. Or, if you're in America and not into the whole brevity thing, Fleming: The Man Who Would Be Bond.

Fleming covers the wartime exploits of the original sexist, misogynist dinosaur, taking us from his final days as the world's worst stockbroker right through to the end of World War II, by which time he was a reasonably successful Naval Intelligence officer with hundreds of ridiculous hun-foiling schemes in his pocket waiting to be assigned to his literary alter ego. Fleming's battles with military red tape while he struggles to make some of these plots reality are balanced with his volatile relationship with Ann O'Neill (Lara Pulver), with whom he conducted a lengthy affair before marrying her in 1952: an event which did not see the end of his (or her) extra-marital escapades.

Anyone who's ever taken any interest in Ian Fleming will be aware that his life was nowhere near as bonkersly mentaloid as Bond's, and that in fact he spent great swathes of his career sitting behind a desk. It's natural, therefore, to be thrown into a mild panic that any dramatisation of his story is going to be either truthful and spectacularly dull, or a second-rate Bondesque travesty full of dream sequences and weapons-grade cobblers. It is with no small sense of relief, then, to discover that Fleming mostly avoids both of these pitfalls, cherry-picking the most telly-worthy of its subject's adventures, filleting out all the typing and filing, throwing in a soupçon of fantasy without devaluing the truth and being bloody entertaining to boot.

The first episode flies by in a whirl of period detail, fabulous dresses and bombing raids on London, and drops Cooper straight into the role of a feckless playboy with no respect for money or women. Despite looking about as much like Ian Fleming as my mum does, Cooper is excellent as the aimless, bored toff, bringing his innate charm to the role of a pretty unlikable cad. Lara Pulver is great too, a porcelain princess without a hair out of place but a gaping hole where her moral compass should be. Anna Chancellor also gives good hairdo as Second Officer Monday, obvious Moneypenny substitute and (entirely fictional) secretary to Fleming's Navy boss, Admiral Godfrey - largely believed to be the template for M.

Things get a bit darker and more complex thereafter, as John Brownlow and Don Macpherson's script probes Ian and Ann's heavily S&M-tinged affair (their first sex scene is uncomfortable viewing for a couple of reasons), and Fleming's involvement in the war becomes muddy and a little tricky to follow. In an attempt to up the action ante, those cheeky fantasy sequences creep in, but they're handled satisfyingly enough to please the casual viewer without insulting the obsessive fan. Plus, let's not forget: this is how Fleming liked to see himself; we're watching a man's imagination unfold on screen as much as his story. And while Dominic Cooper might be less successful at waving a gun around than he is at portraying a lazy socialite, as it's the nearest he'll ever get to playing James Bond it seems fair to cut him some slack.

Fleming should be taken with a fistful of salt, but it's a vast improvement on previous screen versions of the author's life (remember Charles Dance in Goldeneye? Of course not). It's to its credit that it's not fixated on being Bond 23.5, instead becoming a ripping war thriller which treads its own path and delivers a portrayal of a complex man evolving as a person and as a writer. It undertakes its problematic objective in a knowing and intelligent fashion, and survives with only minor casualties. Mission accomplished.

Fleming starts on Wednesday 12th February at 9pm on Sky Atlantic HD and will be available to download on Sky Go from Wednesday 5 February at 9pm.