Ian Fleming received a useful boost to his sales when President Kennedy listed From Russia with Love as one of his ten favourite books. It is also one of the most popular Bond movies and a terrific thriller in its own right, owing much to Alfred Hitchcock and Carol Reed's The Third Man in its marvellous atmosphere of foreign intrigue. Superbly shot on location in a pre-touristy Istanbul, and closely following Fleming's original story, the film has Sean Connery's spy duped into smuggling a top-secret communist decoding machine, plus blonde Russian diplomat Daniela Bianchi, from Turkey to the West via the Orient Express. Lotte Lenya is unforgettable as lesbian villain Rosa Klebb, and Robert Shaw is an impressive hitman who commits a terrible faux pas in front of 007 by ordering red wine with fish.

Agent 007 is back in the second installment of the James Bond series, this time battling a secret crime organization known as SPECTRE. Russians Rosa Klebb and Kronsteen are out to snatch a decoding device known as the Lektor, using the ravishing Tatiana to lure Bond into helping them. Bond willingly travels to meet Tatiana in Istanbul, where he must rely on his wits to escape with his life in a series of deadly encounters with the enemy.