鑽石舞台

John Higgs tells their entwined stories in 「Love and Let Die」

Love and Let Die. By John Higgs. Pegasus Books; 400 pages; $28.95. W&N; £22

「Love me do」, the Beatles』 debut single, was released in Britain on October 5th 1962—on the same day as 「Dr No」 (pictured), the first James Bond film. Six decades on, Paul McCartney recently headlined the Glastonbury festival. And after Daniel Craig’s final turn as Bond, speculation abounds as to who might be the next man—or woman—to play 007.

In 「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. Pepper」 to the gentle nostalgia of songs such as 「Penny Lane」, even as the band embraced new ideas about sex and drugs and spirituality.

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」. In 1981 Ringo Starr married the heroine of 「The Spy Who Loved Me」, Barbara Bach. (Forty years on, the pair are still together.)

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」. In the Beatles film 「A Hard Day’s Night」, a similar hat is 「a sign of pompous authority that needed to be mocked」.

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. This February, for instance, António Guterres, the un’s secretary-general, invoked John Lennon in imploring Vladimir Putin to 「give peace a chance」. Mr Putin was neither shaken nor stirred.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "Yesterday never dies" (Sep 22nd 2022)

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