Sex for Dinner, Death for Breakfast

Enter the seductive and dangerous world of Ian Fleming’s James Bond 007 with Sex for Dinner, Death for Breakfast. In this in-depth cultural study, Brian A. Dixon explores the integral role of the human body in Bond’s adventures, delving into the literature, films, artwork, and advertising associated with the world’s most celebrated secret agent.

Examining the familiar accoutrements of the 007 adventures—including often elaborate references to fashion, food and drink, sex, and methods of execution—Dixon uncovers their profound significance. Each detail accentuates an unwavering focus on the body, revealing the extent to which these narratives are products of their unique cultural and historical moments and the way in which they foretold the future of politics, culture, sexuality, and consumerism.

The body of James Bond represents—then, now, and later—the body politic in its portrayal of what we were, are, and may well be. The appetites of the unforgettable characters who populate his thrilling adventures—for food, power, sex, and killing—are our appetites. Sex for Dinner, Death for Breakfast: James Bond and the Body exposes the ways in which Ian Fleming’s popular fiction and the unending film series it inspired offer a performance of those cultural fears, anxieties, hopes, and desires grounded in the body, assuring James Bond’s status as an incomparably influential cultural icon.