My Best Books

Tina Brown, editor of the Daily Beast, agreed to be interviewed by William Boot (as played by James Naughtie). Why has the character survived in the public consciousness?

It was billed as “Tina Brown meets William Boot” – the legendary magazine editor turned founder of the Daily Beast website in conversation with the hero of Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop, which featured the original Daily Beast. But the person playing the understated twentysomething Englishman, used by Waugh to satirise the journalism of the 1930s, was kept a closely guarded secret, so when he finally came on stage it was certainly a surprise – the voluble middle-aged Scot, James Naughtie.

Naughtie seemed a bit bemused to be playing the role. “Don’t say I’m anything like William Boot,” he tells me in the green room after the talk, which is far more about where the media is going than about the glorious – or perhaps inglorious – past Waugh was lampooning. He also seemed surprised that Brown had adopted the Beast as the name for her website, suggesting on several occasions that it was too negative and that Americans didn’t get Waugh. She told him she adored the book, and that the name was nothing if not memorable.

I catch up with Brown afterwards and ask her why Scoop means so much to her. I’m wearing shorts and a Glamorgan cricket club sunhat, and she seems to doubt my A-list credentials, but in the 90 seconds or so we spend together she at least gives me a clue to her thinking.

“I love the novel because there’s something so deliciously hapless about William Boot [the nature writer who is confused with novelist John Boot and sent to Ishmaelia to cover a civil war],” she says. “And Lord Copper hasn’t changed as a press baron. Journalism has always had its William Boots and its Lord Coppers – they’re archetypes that remain. Even in the internet world, there’s always going to be a Lord Copper and there’s always going to be a William Boot.”

What is interesting about Brown’s view is that while most readers see the Beast as monstrous, she admires its energy. “That newspaper just seemed to me to represent British popular journalism at its most antic,” she says. “That’s what I love about it. It has energy and a slightly irresponsible feel. I don’t see it as negative. There is something very joyful about it.”

This may not have been quite what Waugh intended, but Brown does have a point. Lord Copper – based in part on Lord Beaverbrook, the overbearing but brilliant proprietor of the Daily Express – is so monumental in his awfulness, such a force of nature, that he is the character people tend to remember. “Up to a point, Lord Copper” – the remark with which the Beast’s world-weary foreign editor, Salter, parries any assertion by his boss that is manifestly untrue – is the phrase everyone recalls from the book, and Naughtie naturally ends the talk with it.

Lord Copper’s attitude to journalism is nothing if not vigorous. “What the British public wants first, last and all the time is News,” he tells William. “Remember that the Patriots are in the right and are going to win. The Beast stands by them foursquare. But they must win quickly. The British public has no interest in a war which drags on indecisively. A few sharp victories, some conspicuous acts of personal bravery on the Patriot side and a colourful entry into the capital. That is the Beast policy for war.”

This manic energy permeates the book, giving it an exuberance noted immediately by critics when it appeared in May 1938. “I could not put Mr Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop down until I had finished it,” wrote Frank Swinnerton in the Observer. “He takes the reader straight through the looking glass into a modern Wonderland in which anything may, and probably does, happen.”

More recent writers have tended to agree. William Boyd, who adapted Scoop for TV in 1987, said in an article written to mark the centenary of Waugh’s birth in 2003 that it was his best novel. “It has a classical and deeply satisfying shapeliness, but also contains sequences of hilarious comic writing unrivalled in English literature.”

Christopher Hitchens, in his introduction to the Penguin edition of the novel published in 2000, is equally unstinting. “In the pages of Scoop, we encounter Waugh at the mid-season point of his perfect pitch; youthful and limber and light as a feather.” Both see Scoop as the culmination of the anarchic, fearlessly satirical early Waugh, and argue that thereafter, as his Catholic, conservative outlook comes to dominate, the novels become darker and denser, with an aroma of incense that is too overwhelming for some.

Waugh took more care over Scoop than his other 1930s comedies – Vile Bodies, Black Mischief and A Handful of Dust. As his biographer Martin Stannard points out, “Of all the pre-war manuscripts, that of Scoop is the most heavily emended, and further revision is revealed by the substantial structural changes which appear when it is compared with the printed text.”

Stannard argues that the turmoil in Europe was already making Waugh look beyond the glittering amorality of his earlier books. “The book was intended to delight and to amuse the discriminating, not to educate or confess,” he writes. “But even Waugh was finding this pure aestheticism inadequate to confront the violence into which the western world was collapsing.” The book’s brutal last line – “Outside the owls hunted maternal rodents and their furry brood” – has been seen by some to prefigure war.

The subtitle of Scoop is “A Novel About Journalists”, and it is as a satire on journalism that it is usually considered. Yet, on re-reading the book, I was struck by the fact that the funniest sections are those not directly concerned with journalism, especially the gloriously dysfunctional household at Boot Magna, which makes Cold Comfort Farm look like a picture of suburban normality. If anything, there is a slight falling off in sustained comic writing when Boot gets to Ishmaelia; plot takes over as Waugh explains how William accidentally stumbles on his scoop, and the introduction of some love interest – in the form of the Garbo-esque young German woman Kätchen – is the one mis-step in the book. Bill Deedes, who was one of several prototypes for Boot (certainly contributing the vast amount of luggage with which he travelled), blamed the publisher for wanting a dollop of sex, but offers no evidence to support his claim.

If the comedy sags a little, however, the satire more than compensates. Any working journalist knows that this is how it is: the odd combination of pack mentality and individual competitiveness; the difficulty of establishing “the truth”; the way in which the desire to please – yourself, your bosses, your readers – can seduce you, make you put effect before precision. John Simpson, in his recent book Unreliable Sources, calls Scoop an “eternally accurate novel about journalists . . . as accurate an account of journalism now as it was when it was first published”.

Waugh knew what he was talking about, because he had covered the early part of the Italian assault on Abyssinia for the Daily Mail in 1935. His five-month trip was a fiasco. His one decent story was sent as a cable in Latin to keep it secret, but the foreign desk assumed it was gibberish and binned it; he was out of town when the biggest story of the war, concerning a mysterious British financier who tried to stymie the Italian advance, broke; and the Mail quickly lost faith in him and told him to return. Unlike Boot, he did not manage to pull off a journalistic coup to save his bacon.

It is often assumed that Waugh wrote Scoop in a fit of pique – to get his own back on journalists who had outplayed him – but that’s nonsense. In Waugh in Abyssinia, the pro-Italian (and thus pro-fascist) book he wrote about the conflict in 1936, he described one of his fellow journalists, Stewart Emeny, correspondent of the anti-Mussolini News Chronicle. Waugh doesn’t name him, but throughout calls him “the Radical”, and he looks to me like the model for Pappenhacker in Scoop.

Waugh’s treatment of Pappenhacker is significant, because unlike some of the stock journalistic characters in Scoop – Shumble, Pigge, Whelper, even the capable Corker – he is treated as zealous in the pursuit of truth. Much of it echoes what he says about the Radical in Waugh in Abyssinia.

“I found his zeal and industry a standing reproach . . . He never stopped writing, he was continually jotting things down in a little notebook; all events for him had only one significance and standard of measurement – whether or not they constituted a ’story’. He did not make friends, he ‘established contacts’.” This is often treated as an attack on Emeny, but that is to ignore the last line of the description: “In the final reckoning he probably sent back sounder information than the rest of us.” Significantly, the Radical got the big story that Waugh missed.

Waugh’s real point is not that journalists are stupid, craven and corrupt, but that establishing the truth is exceedingly difficult, perhaps impossible. He was deeply suspicious of rationalism – as a Catholic he would say that only God truly knows – and Scoop is not an attack on journalism so much as an assault on human arrogance.

As Brown and Simpson point out, Scoop still has much to offer to journalists and general readers, but a word of warning – it is littered with racist terms which will offend modern sensibilities (though that racism is far starker in Waugh in Abyssinia than in Scoop). But while you can bemoan the racist assumptions of Waugh in Abyssinia, and you might recoil from some of the language in Scoop, if you trace the journey from one to the other, you realise he was sufficiently scrupulous as a writer of fiction to ensure that, ultimately, art defied politics.

What was on the way up, and crashing down to the bargain bin, at the Hay festival

Up

Thinkers on the dancefloor

AC Grayling saw off Alain de Botton, with Niall Ferguson a late challenger after-hours at the festival.

Fickle security

One day ex-president Musharraf has none, the next day the whole of Hay is locked down.

Sit-down meals

Sky and GQ parties had them. Is this really the new austerity?

Moving testimony

Thomas Buergenthal’s memories of surviving Auschwitz sparked an unprecedented two-minute standing ovation.

Fetishes

Lynn Barber reminiscing about her Penthouse days interviewing amputee lovers, and Grayson Perry on using the internet to find others who get kicks out of headscarves.

Down

iPads

All chat, but no sightings. Tina Brown is in the “for” camp, but Nadine Gordimer says nothing will replace the book.

Posh nosh

Overpriced venison burgers. Extortionate cheese boards. All we could afford was a sheep’s milk ice cream.

Jaywalking

Hay’s obedient crowds patiently queued for hours, well, minutes, to cross the road via the designated pedestrian crossing.

Random celeb-spotting

Any advance on Anneka Rice, Kelly Jones and, er, Aggie MacKenzie?

In the extracts from Alastair Campbell’s diaries you publish (29 May), you say – presumably by way of summary of a longer passage from the diaries – “A book by Bryan Gould has ‘outed’ Peter Mandelson”. The issue of Peter’s sexuality had in fact been the subject of a major front-page story in the News of the World, eight years earlier than the publication of my book, in the middle of the 1987 election campaign. There was no question of my “outing” Peter in 1995. I referred to the episode in my book, not to damage Peter, but to show that the Labour party had rallied to his support. When the rightwing press reported me as “outing” him in 1995, I prepared to sue for defamation and desisted only when I was led to understand that Peter would be further embarrassed if I did so.

Bryan Gould

Opotiki, New Zealand

They let us out of the studio to spend a night in the museum…

It was our first ever recording in front of a live audience, taking over part of London’s Science Museum to discuss the nature of genius.

Making his first appearance on this podcast was genius personified Stephen Hawking, who opened a debate on The Genius of Britain at the museum’s IMAX cinema earlier in the evening.

The theoretical physicist features in Channel 4’s new TV series Genius of Britain: Scientists Who Changed the World which began on 30 May. You’ll be able to catch up with any episodes you miss on 4oD.

We spoke to someone who could be considered a modern day genius, a man estimated to be worth more than a billion pounds, entrepreneur-inventor Sir James Dyson.

Our guest for the night, and helping us to nail the nature of genius, was psychologist Dr Kevin Dutton. Kevin is an expert on social influence. His new book Flipnosis is out now.

On our panel of Guardian genii were Nell Boase and science correspondent Ian Sample. Earlier we sent them roaming around the museum’s Lates event: Nell tested her IQ, and Ian watched as the Babbage difference engine came to life.

We also handed the mic over to our audience to nominate their favourite genius and ask questions of the panel.

If you came along, thanks so much. We would love to get your feedback on the night. We hope you enjoyed it. You can add your comments below or tweet @iansample, @alokjha or @scienceweekly. Relive the night by keying #swlive.

View our pictures and upload your own to our Flickr photostream.

Finally, our thanks to the wonderful staff at London’s Science Museum.

WARNING: contains strong language.

Follow the podcast on our Science Weekly Twitter feed and receive updates on all breaking science news stories from Guardian Science.

Email scienceweeklypodcast@gmail.com.

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The World Cup has inspired a number of books about football in Africa

One of the side-effects of the decision to allow Africa to host the World Cup is the publication, by high-calibre writers, of books describing the continent’s football or, in some of the most fascinating, the continent through football. The wait has been worthwhile.

All over the world football has social, political significance but in few places is that as strong as in parts of Africa. In African Soccerscapes, Peter Alegi charts, in a sober, academic tone, the formation of clubs and leagues across the continent during colonial times and explains how many became instigators or conduits of independence movements.

“The metaphor of sport as an arena of meritocracy and fair play was taken seriously … and it came to express African people’s desire for equality and freedom,” writes Alegi, who goes on to outline how, just as football helped form a national identity to overthrow imperialism, it also reinforced regional or ethnic chauvinism that, in some cases, complicated the post-independence stability of nations whose boundaries had been traced arbitrarily by colonialists.

Among the examples cited is Algeria, whose government owed its own formation to a football team. Alegi tells how a side created by the Front National de Liberation in 1956 became such a powerful arm in the war of independence from France that the team’s anthem later became that of the country. It’s an extraordinary tale related even more comprehensively by Ian Hawkey in Feet of the Chameleon.

Hawkey, whose writing is as elegant as it is intelligent, has travelled extensively through the continent and his book is enriched not just by his own knowledge and observations but also by the first-hand accounts from the many influential people he has interviewed, from Samuel Eto’o to Kalusha Bwalya, the one Zambia star who was not on board the plane that crashed in 1994, killing in one tragic instant a team that may have been about to prove it was Africa’s best ever.

The strongest chapter in Hawkey’s book is on football’s role in the Algerian freedom fight. He allows much of it to be told by Mohammed Maouche, one of the prime movers in an adventure that is part James Bond, part Victor Laszlo.

Steve Bloomfield, the author of Africa United, is an intrepid traveller and his compilation of dispatches from the parts of the continent most recently afflicted by war conveys how people’s determination to play football, whether illicitly in Somalia or without limbs that were chopped off in Sierra Leone, can inspire and uplift.

Pioneering child-friendly workshops to be launched in Britain

It is hard to get some children inside a library – but a high-street shop selling pirate eye patches or superhero equipment is much more of a draw.

This is the simple principle behind a literacy movement that has taken hold in America, and is coming to Britain.

The novelist and screenwriter Dave Eggers, best known for his 2000 bestseller A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and his publishing house McSweeney’s, has set up a series of enticing drop-in centres in cities across the US to promote writing and reading among children. Now a British team of writers and arts entrepreneurs is to create a version in London, with the backing of Eggers and initial funding from Arts Council England.

The first children’s centre to try his radical approach was established in 2002, in Eggers’s native San Francisco.

Named after its address in the Mission district of the city and guilefully hidden behind a Pirate Supply Store shopfront, “826 Valencia” helps students aged from eight to 18 to develop writing skills in informal workshops. By seducing young patrons with pirate parrots and peg legs, it removed the stigma associated with extra literacy lessons.

The San Francisco store was followed by a Superhero Supply Store in Brooklyn, New York, which sells capes and tins of “anti-matter”. Seattle then took up the challenge, setting up the Greenwood Space Travel Supply Company. The growing network of individual projects is linked through the Once Upon a School website.

Writers behind the London project are to pilot a similar venture in an unused shop for six months, and are seeking a suitable space and further funding.

As in America, the store will be largely staffed by volunteers. Eggers recently attended an open meeting in London and called for public support. Ben Payne, one of the British organising team, was inspired: “He did a call to action that brought together a passionate and excited group of volunteers after the show, all buzzing about how we could make an 826 London centre.” The novelist’s instruction to “follow the weird” is crucial, Payne believes, and he is now looking for an unusual shopfront for the store. Plans for a London centre started in earnest this February, but other writers and community workers have also been keen to copy Eggers’s idea.

A project called First Story has already sent well-known authors such as Zadie Smith into schools. Writer Kate Waldegrave, who co-founded First Story, said she believed there is a better tradition of “educational charitable enterprise” in America. “That’s a bit of a shame about England, but I think it is changing.”

In Ireland the novelist Roddy Doyle has established a writing centre in north Dublin called Fighting Words.

The new parliament is a strange mix of muddled newbies, Labour leadership speeches and a baby-faced chancellor

✒ Strange seeing the new parliament. Familiar voices come from the wrong side of the chamber, as if your stereo had gone wrong. Newbies are desperate to demonstrate that they are part of the “new politics” yet at the same time nervously try to follow the traditions, often getting them wrong, blurting out a name instead of a constituency. Every Labour speech is seen as part of the leadership contest, as if the starving French army, retreating from Moscow, devoted its time to arguing about who should replace Napoleon.

George Osborne looks impossibly young to be chancellor. He reminds me of a joke Alan Coren told. A young Jewish lad from Brooklyn makes a pile and buys a yacht plus the full outfit, including a peaked cap with braided anchor. He proudly visits his parents. His mother sighs. “To me, you’re a captain. To your father, you’re a captain. But to a captain, are you a captain?” It’s all very confusing.

Russell Grant, the man who reads the stars, has engaged a PR company to send his prognostications to the press and tout for business. Apparently these past few weeks have been dangerous for political talks, owing to Mercury being retrograde. “When Saturn moves back into Libra on July 21, is when [sic] we will start to see Cameron emerge as prime minister …”

Memo from an old political hack to Russell: only make your predictions after the event. Otherwise you risk looking like a complete prannet.

And last Monday, there landed on my desk a coalition mug, on which Nick Clegg and David Cameron gaze adoringly into each other’s eyes. It’s marked Made in China. This means that in less than two weeks, contracts have been signed, artwork emailed 6,000 miles, the mugs produced, shipped to Britain, and parcelled off to journalists. This is an awesome example of globalisation.

✒ Now and again, you realise that there are parts of this country which remain glorious, as fine as anywhere else in the world. Last weekend we went to Fowey, Cornwall, for the Daphne du Maurier literary festival, where I was doing a turn. The event is held high above the town with almost miraculous views over green lawns, scarlet rhododendrons, the ancient waterfront, and the sun glittering on the estuary. The festival may be threatened by local authority cuts. I would be fearful. Local authorities do not always live in the same world as us.

“As your treasurer I must tell you that times are hard. We have a choice between backing the Du Maurier festival, which brings thousands of people into Cornwall, and sends them home carolling the matchless beauty of our county. Or we could have a few more speed bumps.” You just know which one they’ll choose.

In the car we listened to the CD of the author’s last big success, The House on the Strand, set a few miles away in the Treesmill valley, where we visited the lovely Hidden Valley gardens. Then, a huge treat, to the Camel Valley vineyard, where Bob Lindo, a former RAF pilot (and Guardian reader – unusual in the wine trade), makes one of the two finest English sparklers. We sat with Bob on his terrace, gazing down the rows of vines that dip down the majestic, sun-sodden valley, sipping half a dozen of his finest wines, so much in demand that he only has a limited supply for his daughter’s wedding this summer. His bubbles win awards around the world, but 21 years ago he started out with a Curry’s fridge and inserted the crucial sugar dosage in each bottle with a sheep dipper. Everyone can go, any summer day except Sundays.

In the evening we drove into the setting sun to a friend’s rambling house in west Cornwall, where she served each guest a whole lobster that had been crawling in the sea that morning. Once a year, perhaps, nature and mankind present you with a perfect day. That was ours for 2010.

✒ My old friend Valerie Grove has a new book, So Much To Tell, about Kaye Webb, the woman best known for running the Puffin Club and publishing some of the most loved children’s books since the war. Valerie has become a friend of Ronald Searle, who was married to Kaye before moving out, without warning or explanation, after 10 years and two children. He now lives in France, where he has just celebrated his 90th birthday. Even the modern masters – Steve Bell, Gerald Scarfe, Posy Simmonds – acknowledge Searle as the greatest cartoonist of the age, so it’s particularly sad that he has left his archive to a German museum. This is partly because he’s fed up with being remembered here only for St Trinian’s and Molesworth and not for his more serious reportage. It’s a little like AA Milne imagining that he would be feted for his plays while Winnie-the-Pooh was forgotten.

So it’s lucky that the Cartoon Museum, near the British Museum, has another month of its exhibition of Searle’s work – happily including a few St Trinian’s and Molesworths. It will be the last chance for us to see some of his finest work.

✒ I’ve been overwhelmed by your response to my piece about cliches in detective shows. I’ll do more next week. In the meantime thanks to EW Grogan: “If the opening scene is of a bulldozer on a building site or quarry, the next shot will uncover a body. If the opening shot is people messing about on a river, the next shot will show a body hidden in the reeds.”

Cliche lines, from Lucy Fisher: “Suspect: ‘I went for a walk’. Detective: ‘In the middle of the night? In a snowstorm?’”

“By rights, I ought to take you off this case”; “My private life is no concern of yours!”; “Please don’t try to be funny, inspector. It doesn’t suit you.”

Willie Stackpool reminds me of the crowded pub, from which the old geezer reels away saying: “I know what I saw.” He never makes it home.

Mr Campbell was close to the leaders, but he kept just enough distance to record other people’s absurdities

He was there at the beginning in 1997 and – as the Guardian photographer Martin Argles’s striking images of Gordon Brown’s final hours in No 10 confirmed – he was there at the end too. Alastair Campbell, for better and, many would say, for worse, was part of the soul of the Labour government. He was more than a media communicator; his personality was written into Labour’s approach to power – bullish, sometimes misdirected, but unafraid to press on where others might have faltered. The new government paid him an odd tribute this week when it refused to put up a minister to face him on the BBC’s Question Time; and though that decision was wrong, Labour would do well to ask why an unelected former adviser has proved a better and more controversial advocate for its cause than scores of lately discarded ministers.

Today the Guardian begins the serialisation of extracts from Mr Cambell’s diaries – being published in more complete form now that his party has lost power. They are, as even his detractors agree, compelling in their record of the minutiae of politics – the small human battles, the anxieties and contradictions that determine what happens as much as any grand public policy programme. But they are also characteristic of another political truth: that observations taken from below are more interesting than those made from the very top. Mr Campbell was of course close to the leaders of his party. But he was not one of them. Like Chris Mullin, a junior minister and MP whose diaries have been much read by incoming Conservative ministers, he kept just enough distance to record other people’s absurdities.

There was a time when every important former minister could count on a book contract, but now the public are growing tired of stolid political memoirs. Tony Blair is writing one; Alistair Darling, if he chooses to be waspish, might produce an unexpected hit. But by and large people want to read diaries. Perhaps a distrustful public hope that a contemporary account might be more honest than a retrospective retelling – though there is nothing to stop selective editing of the kind that means Chips Channon’s political diaries are still sadly incomplete 80 years after the events they describe.

But even this immediacy is being superseded by another. Mr Cambell used Twitter to mock the government over its refusal to confront him on Question Time. Perhaps he wrote a note in his diary too, but by the time it is public will anyone be interested? The alternative, of course, is to make the delay even longer. This November the complete version of Mark Twain’s autobiography is to be published: he made us wait 100 years for unexpurgated truth.

The wizard kid visits Legoland at the end of next month, but for now here’s another taster from this building block adventure

Taking in elements from the first four reasonably well-known novels, Lego Harry Potter looks set to continue the tradition of Traveller’s Tales’
hugely entertaining Lego games, mixing recognisable characters and scenes with humour-filled action adventure gameplay.

I went up to get a behind-the-scenes look at the development studio last week, and we’ll be putting up a video of that visit soon. But for now, here’s the latest trailer. As ever, let us know what you think in the comments section.

US author commissioned by Ian Fleming’s estate to continue British spy’s adventures

He might be the quintessential English spy, suave, laconic and comfortable in a dinner jacket, but the adventures of Ian Fleming’s iconic creation James Bond are set to be continued by the chart-topping American thriller writer Jeffery Deaver.

Best known for his quadriplegic detective Lincoln Rhyme, the star of books including The Bone Collector and The Stone Monkey, Deaver has been commissioned to write a new Bond novel by Fleming’s estate. Currently known as Project X, the book will be set in the present day, unlike Sebastian Faulks’s recent addition to the Bond oeuvre, Devil May Care, which took place in 1967.

Apart from its contemporary setting, Deaver was giving little else away about the plot, but revealed it would occur over a short period of time and take 007 to “three or four exotic locations around the globe”. He has already started writing the book, which is out next May, and promised it would retain “the persona of James Bond as Fleming created him and the unique tone the author brought to his books”, while also incorporating his own “literary trademarks: detailed research, fast pacing and surprise twists”.

Fleming’s estate was moved to approach Deaver after he raved about the Bond books in an acceptance speech for the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger award. “I’d always enjoyed Jeffery Deaver’s thrillers [but] I didn’t know anything about the author himself and expected a fairly low-key response from him when he received our award,” said Corinne Turner, the managing director of Ian Fleming Publications.

“I was surprised and delighted when he spoke very fondly of Ian and about the influence that the Bond books had had on his own writing career. It was at that point that I first thought James Bond could have an interesting adventure in Jeffery Deaver’s hands.”

Fleming’s 14 James Bond novels have sold more than 100m copies around the world, and Faulks’s Devil May Care, published in 2008 to mark the centenary of Fleming’s birth, was Penguin’s fastest selling hardback fiction title ever.

The publisher of Deaver’s contribution, Hodder & Stoughton, has equally lofty expectations for Project X. “We’ve very high hopes,” said Hodder & Stoughton’s publishing director of fiction, Carolyn Mays, adding that the American Deaver is actually well placed to take on a British icon. “If Bond fans know Jeffery and his work they won’t have any qualms about it at all. He is American but he knows Fleming and Bond back to front, and he’s also got a very European sensibility. I’m sure he will do a brilliant job and do Bond justice.”

Previous official Bond novels have been written by authors including Kingsley Amis, John Gardner and Raymond Benson.