In 'Love and Let Die,' John Higgs explores a fascinating premise: That the Beatles and James Bond embodied the postwar battle for the soul of Britain.
,” this confluence of events is its own neutron bomb, the moment when England found itself confronted with two opposing views of itself: Bond a metaphor for a colonial power clinging to the last vestiges of its brawn in the wake of the Second World War, and a younger generation of Beatles fans poised to unshackle itself from all the Empire stood for, particularly its notions of class and privilege.
Sixty years on, it’s difficult to imagine the anodyne “Love Me Do” as a transgressive act, but it wasn’t so much the song as the idea of the Beatles that unsettled Britain’s ruling class. The four band members were low-born Northerners from a dingy port town with no formal education; their success was against the natural order of things, an act of effrontery.
His destiny was laid out before him in shades of beige: marriage and a family, a high-ranking job in the civil service. Fleming became engaged to a woman he didn’t love and found himself moving toward glum respectability — until he created.
The comely female characters in Fleming’s Bond stories are more props than people, a diversion until they are a nuisance. “Fleming wanted to sleep with glamorous, exciting women,” writes Higgs. “Then he just wanted them to disappear afterwards.” The body count among Bond’s lovers is alarmingly high: “Bond is death and must always be so. The women he touches, therefore, must die.
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