Writer Ian Fleming’s 007 spy series is being modernised to protect readers’ “sensitivity”, publishers say.

Philip Dewhurst, president of the James Bond Fan Club, said: “This feels like the latest in a long line of extreme over­reactions to an issue nobody asked to be solved.

“Airbrushing the things we don’t like from our past are fraught with danger.

“Please don’t rewrite words of an author 70 years on.”

In the new version of Live And Let Die, a scene in a New York club is altered to remove a striptease reference.

The original version from 1954 reads: “Bond could hear the audience panting and grunting like pigs at the trough.”

The revised version will now say: “Bond could sense the electric tension in the room.”

The N-word, which author Ian Fleming used in the 1950s and 1960s, has been removed.

But some outdated references to other ethnicities remain, as do phrases such as the “sweet tang of rape”.

Ian Fleming Publications said the re-issued novels will feature a disclaimer stating: “This book was written at a time when terms and attitudes which might be considered offensive by modern readers were commonplace.”

It comes amid a row over Roald Dahl’s children’s books being stripped of potentially offensive terms such as “fat”, and Willy Wonka’s Oompa Loompas becoming gender neutral.