Scott Anthony

With the safe return of Artemis II, we are a step closer to humans landing on the moon for the first time since the 1970s. To do this we’ve had to relearn ways of doing things that were in danger of being forgotten. It is perhaps a good time then to remember a man who was one of Britain’s most remarkable visionaries when it came to space. Decades before they came into existence, the artist Ralph Smith (born in 1905) designed a world of spaceships, rovers and moon bases that remain relevant today.

Those attending the premiere of No Time to Die this week would perhaps be surprised to learn that the Bond films were once considered to be a national security threat. In the 1960s, with the image of Cold War espionage increasingly becoming shaped by films like Dr No, and TV series like Danger Man and The Avengers, MI6 feared that campy pulp fiction would drown out the real threat of Communist subversion. ‘The biggest single risk to security at the present time,’ one Whitehall report argued, ‘is probably a general lack of conviction that any substantial threat exists.’ ‘The master spy’, the intelligence services complained, ‘seems as much a part of bad fiction as the master criminal.