There is a particular kind of lunch, served on white tablecloths in a London restaurant, at which a woman is told, between courses, that she is about to be written out of the story she has lived in for twenty years. Judi Dench remembers hers clearly. In her new memoir, Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It?, she describes being taken to the Wolseley by the Bond producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson and the director Sam Mendes, who explained, over the clink of cutlery, that her M would be killed off in Skyfall.

Daniel Craig was not there, she thinks, though she adds a line that lands like a dropped glass: apparently, the idea had been his. Dench is gracious about it, and brisk. She dismisses the newspaper story that she wept, pointing out that she had enjoyed eight Bond films, one more than Roger Moore, the longest-serving 007 before her. Tears, she implies, would have been an odd response to such a run.

The revelation sharpens a pattern that was already visible. Craig himself has said that, on the flight home from the Berlin premiere of Casino Royale in 2006, he asked Broccoli whether he might be allowed to kill Bond at the end of his fourth film. He eventually got something even more final, in No Time to Die, where the hero vanishes in a storm of missiles. Previous Bonds have hardened into caricature: the sexy one, the wooden one, the camp one.

Craig, seen through Dench's anecdote, emerges as something stranger, an actor who treated the role as a story that had to end.