“Love and Let Die”, a new book by John Higgs, uses these two icons to recount the cultural history of post-imperial Britain
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskIn “Love and Let Die”, John Higgs cleverly uses these two coeval phenomena to recount the cultural history of post-imperial Britain. The Bond books and films, he argues, at once celebrate jet-set modernity and cleave to attitudes—“to women, to class, to non-British people”—that are long past their sell-by date. The Beatles, too, clung to tradition, from the “faux Victoriana” of “Sgt.
They have more in common than you might think. In “Goldfinger”, Bond warns a paramour against “listening to the Beatles without earmuffs”. Nevertheless, after watching that film, Mr McCartney bought an Aston Martin just like 007’s; some years later he co-wrote the theme tune for “Live and Let Die”. During the filming of “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”, meanwhile, the movie’s one-off Bond, George Lazenby, spent all his downtime trying to learn the chords for “Hey Jude”.
Yet in Mr Higgs’s telling, the two British icons also embody contrasting attitudes to life and politics. He teases out this conceit with a critic’s attention to detail. The titular villain of “Goldfinger” is in love with money, he notes; contemporaneously, the Beatles disparaged wealth in their single “Can’t Buy Me Love”. In the same Bond film, the hat belonging to Oddjob, a grisly assassin, “was a lethal weapon to be feared”.
It is the imagination, Mr Higgs argues, which best tells “the story of our internal lives”. Still, he accepts that, for many people, culture is trivia. Power—military, monarchical or monetary—is the lens through which history is normally understood. And with good reason: the world of realpolitik has generally been impervious to both Bond’s patriotic derring-do and the Beatles’ love-ins.
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