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“Shall we sue?” wrote the architect Erno Goldfinger to his lawyer. It was 1959, and he had been sent a pre-publication copy of Ian Fleming’s eponymous James Bond novel, in which his very recognisable Hungarian-émigré name was given to a villain with a passing resemblance to himself.

Goldfinger handed the book to his assistant Jacob Blacker. “Read the book and tell me whether it’s true or not!” he barked. The next day, Blacker told him, tongue in cheek, that the only substantial difference he could see between the two men was that Bond’s version was called Auric, not Erno. As Nigel Warburton makes clear in this excellent biography, Blacker was sailing close to the wind. Goldfinger’s assistants were sometimes sacked for levity, though he did not quite fling them into tanks of piranhas. Once, he rang up the office unexpectedly from home. Answering, his employee Douglas Stephen mimicked his heavily accented phone manner: “Here Goldfinger!” There was a pause at the other end, then: “No! HERE Goldfinger! You’re fired!” And he was.

Fleming’s villain was only 5ft tall, while the real Goldfinger towered like one of his buildings. Then again, both were naturalised Jews with a love of fast cars. Both were essentially communist, and, although Goldfinger never accrued masses of wealth like his fictional counterpart, he certainly enjoyed the good things in life. He was also a brutal but inspiring tyrant in the office, and one of Britain’s finest and most uncompromising post-war architects, whose career could have been damaged in the late 1950s by any implied connection with cold-war Russia.

So he unleashed his lawyers. This enraged Fleming, who had learnt of Goldfinger through a mutual friend and immediately threatened to change the name of the character to Goldprick. Nothing much came of all this — apart from giggly fans of the 1964 film ringing up the irate architect pretending to be James Bond — but the publishers paid Erno costs and gave him six copies of the book.

You can still see one of them today at Goldfinger’s preserved 1937 house in Willow Road, Hampstead. Next to it is the low grey top hat of Auguste Perret, the master architect who was his student tutor in Paris in the 1920s. Today the house is owned and managed by the National Trust, which tells you plenty about how attitudes have changed, because Goldfinger, who went on to build some of the most architecturally ambitious office and tower blocks in London, was once reviled but is now once again highly regarded. His architecture — or such of it as was not demolished or altered beyond recognition during the 1980s — endures. And here at last is a good, accessible biography of him.

“There are good architects and bad architects. I am a good architect,” he said, correctly. Warburton’s account is of a period when there was a diaspora of artistic talent moving across Europe, and Goldfinger (although he was no refugee) was in the thick of it. “Everyone always seems to have known me,” he remarked. As for his Jewishness (he was an atheist), he considered changing his name in the anti-semitic 1930s, then rejected the idea. “Marvellous! Let’s change it to Cohen, then!” he would bellow.

Warburton notes that he developed his sculptural, classically proportioned style in the 1930s, and more or less stuck with it throughout his life, applying it to larger and larger projects, such as his famous Balfron and Trellick towers in London. In the former, he and his wife Ursula moved into Flat 130, on the 26th floor, for two months in 1968. They invited all the East End tenants, floor by floor, to champagne parties. Easy to sneer, but this way Goldfinger learnt of a number of niggling shortcomings in his design, which he then put right in the next one.

Goldfinger’s life is part of the fascinating history of migratory mid-century modernism. You cannot help liking him, as even his put-upon assistants liked him. He was, truly, just as likely to fire his own clients. And how typical of him, somehow, to have struck up a friendship with the elderly Sir Edwin Lutyens, doyen of the pre-modern English country house. “I’m an architect, you know,” the young man said on meeting Lutyens in 1942. Lutyens immediately proffered his hand ceremonially. “So am I. Shake!”

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