Many of us have probably wondered occasionally, and some of us frequently, why the villains in James Bond movies don't kill him when they can. They brag, prevaricate, and defer. They inform Bond what a nuisance he is to their plans and how much they're going to enjoy finishing him off and living in a world without Bond. While they're transported by their oratory, Bond extricates himself from the corner he's painted himself into. The world in which there's no Bond hasn't come into existence. We have to ascribe this to the garrulity of his antagonists. We can also ascribe it to Bond's powers as a listener (indispensable, one hears, to the seducer) and his facility for repartee. One of the reasons that the villain keeps talking is because he's determined to out-repartee Bond (a Herculean task). More than Q's factory-line innovations, it's words that give Bond his longevity.

Amit Chaudhuri deconstructs the man we all love, James Bond. Read the column here.