The Ghosts That Haunted 007

Daniel Craig as James Bond and Mads Mikkelsen as Le Chiffre in the 2006 film 'Casino Royale'

The real James Bond novels — the ones written by 007’s creator Ian Fleming during the 1950s and 1960s — include several scenes in which the captured British secret agent is rather lovingly tortured by his older male adversaries, often with a sneering, “daddy-spank” authoritarian hauteur.

The source of all that is probably the vicious canings delivered by Fleming’s housemaster when he was a boy at Eton. The housemaster was described as a sadist even in the school’s official history.

Funny how much of what surrounds us is animated by the poltergeist ghosts of childhood. How persistently they tug at our sleeves.