This is all of a piece with the hoariest old jokes about British masculinity offscreen, too. Left to our own devices, we're just as likely to try on the scullery maids' uniforms as we are to impregnate their wearers, and we yearn nightly for the sweet taste of the headmaster's cane or, failing that, the sweet taste of Fotherington-Thomas minor of the Lower Remove, so tautly do his pubescent buttocks press against the seat of his cricket flannels. How the clich s endure. Wait a minute. So there you have it.
British males are all nancy-boys.
Or they're all rutting like stoats. One or the other. Still, one must admit that there is about Grant and Brosnan some lingering residue of the old stereotypes. It's a very confusing, almost sexless sex appeal that Grant exudes, somewhere between one of James Fox's useless toffs and Niven's suave emollience. Meanwhile, Brosnan, far from accessing the predatory sexual menace of Connery's Bond, seems unable to add even the merest hint of soul to his own expensively upholstered surface beauty.