“A body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody ought not to be trusted by anybody.”
— Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, 1791The making of Elon Musk: how did his childhood in apartheid South Africa shape him?
“You’re next,” said a Russian historian I interviewed in 1993 about the Soviet Union’s collapse in late 1991. I was an American student in St. Petersburg, and he was referring to the United States.
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The majestic Weissenhaus estate has been owned by nobles, survived a devastating fire and hosted world leaders. Its striking castle, white facade illuminated by the glow from the windows, sits on the banks of the Baltic, in northern Germany. A golden frieze stands out against the dark, pitched roof.
In a big barn opposite the castle, a crowd has gathered. On stage is a towering man, the owner of Weissenhaus. Jan Henric Buettner, lit by red lights against a dark curtain, grips the back of a large, transparent table. He tips hundreds of numbered lottery balls down a slide, where they cascade into an orb-like bowl.
At the invitation of the host, I dip into the cluster and pluck out a sphere. Number 328. This ball, in its own small way, will determine the outcome of the inaugural Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour.
Freestyle Chess is a new name for an old idea, a variant in which the pieces on the back row — king, queen, rooks, bishops and knights — start in a randomised position. The pieces on the other side mirror this arrangement. It’s also known as Fischer Random, after Bobby Fischer, the American chess legend, or as Chess960, after the number of possible starting positions. Fischer had grown sick of how theory stifled creativity in the regular game. “I’m not anti-chess, I’m pro-chess,” he explained. “I’m trying to keep it alive.”
Somebody won and somebody lost, but — unusually for a story about James Bond — it’s hard to say who. Eon Productions handed over creative control of 007 films to Amazon MGM Studios; Barbara Broccoli and her half-brother Michael G Wilson ceded their stewardship of Ian Fleming’s character to whatever team Amazon puts in place. It could be James Gunn directing Henry Cavill, or Kathryn Bigelow helming an Idris Elba movie. As with so much of 2025, the future is a mystery.
But perhaps it was a mystery before, too. The report is that Broccoli — the defining tonal instinct of Bond since taking over from her father Albert “Cubby” Broccoli with Wilson in 1995 — had no concrete plan for where to go next. A franchise declared dead in the early 2000s and then revitalised by Daniel Craig’s ambiguous, sometimes self-hating hero is once again a notion written at the top of a whiteboard. What if Bond . . . what? Is there a next iteration in the age of Bourne, Reacher and Kingsman? Did Eon lose a war of attrition, or did Amazon pay some version of a billion-dollar price tag for the right to clear the table after the feast?
I should own up: apart from being an avid follower of Bond gossip, I also have a role in running a literary estate. My father was John le Carré, creator of George Smiley (whether you prefer him in the person of Sir Alec Guinness or Gary Oldman) and The Night Manager (Tom Hiddleston). When Dad died in 2020, he left us a literary legacy of 26 novels. He also charged us (tongue, I promise, firmly in cheek) with a minor duty common to many writers’ last wishes: his literary executors — these being his sons — should please do their best to secure his work’s renown in perpetuity, find new audiences to admire his prescience and in so far as possible make him even more famous in death than in life. Thus our commercial and moral responsibilities are aligned, and he gets to poke fun at himself and us from the writers’ smoke-filled and whiskied hereafter.
While both Bond and Smiley are spies, the properties are radically at odds. Bond is explosive, seductive and charming, and his solutions to evil are best left in the realm of fantasy; Smiley is thoughtful, wise and melancholic, a rebuke to shooting your problems — but at the same time a man without answers beyond a stalwart, perhaps doomed determination to do the best and most human thing. They require different creative treatment — but throw up the same dilemma: the tension between control and innovation, which inevitably is also a conversation about IP and about the core philosophy of an estate.
By dint of some good fortune, but really as a result of decades of tough negotiation by my father and his advisers, the le Carré IP grid — the roster of rights held — is remarkably coherent and unencumbered. Most estates find themselves part-owners of their legacy at best, often with a complex and moth-eaten blanket of rights. Not here: one way and another, all the significant IP is accessible or just outright owned by the estate’s commercial vehicle, John le Carré Ltd, run by my other half, Clare.
