![]() The ethnicity of a barman in Thunderball is similarly omitted in new editions. In the same novel, the race of a doctor and an immigration officer now go unmentioned, as does that of a henchman shot by Bond. In one example, some criminals escaping from Bond in Dr No become simply “gangsters”. In most cases, this is replaced by “black person” or “black man”, but racial descriptors are entirely dropped in some instances. The word “n-”, which Fleming used to refer to black people when he was writing during the Fifties and Sixties, has been almost entirely expunged from the revised texts. The revised section replaces the pigs reference with: “Bond could sense the electric tension in the room.”Ī further lengthy passage describing Bond’s night out in Harlem, including an argument between a man and his girlfriend conducted largely in accented dialogue Fleming describes as “straight Harlem-Deep South with a lot of New York thrown in”, has been entirely removed. ![]() He felt his own hands gripping the tablecloth. The original passage read: “Bond could hear the audience panting and grunting like pigs at the trough. In the sensitivity reader-approved version of Live and Let Die, Bond’s assessment that would-be African criminals in the gold and diamond trades are “pretty law-abiding chaps I should have thought, except when they’ve drunk too much” becomes – “pretty law-abiding chaps I should have thought.”Īnother altered scene features Bond visiting Harlem in New York, where a salacious strip tease at a nightclub makes the male crowd, including 007, increasingly agitated. ![]() References to the “sweet tang of rape”, “blithering women” failing to do a “man’s work”, and homosexuality being a “stubborn disability” also remain. The changes to Fleming’s books result in some depictions of black people being reworked or removed.ĭated references to other ethnicities remain, such as Bond’s racial terms for east Asian people and the spy’s disparaging views of Oddjob, Goldfinger’s Korean henchman. “A number of updates have been made in this edition, while keeping as close as possible to the original text and the period in which it is set.” The Telegraph understands that a disclaimer accompanying the reissued texts will read: “This book was written at a time when terms and attitudes which might be considered offensive by modern readers were commonplace. ![]() Ian Fleming Publications Ltd, the company that owns the literary rights to the author’s work, commissioned a review by sensitivity readers of the classic texts under its control. James Bond novels have been rewritten to remove a number of racial references from Ian Fleming’s work, The Telegraph can reveal.Īll of the author’s thrillers featuring 007 are set to be reissued in April to mark 70 years since Casino Royale, the first book in the series, was published. ![]()
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