“If the question that post-imperial Britain needed to answer was when we should hold onto the traditional and when we should embrace the new,” writes author John Higgs, “then Bond and the Beatles gave us very different answers.”

The Yin and Yang of 1960s Britain

By Bruce Handy

Love and Let Die: James Bond, The Beatles, and the British Psyche by John Higgs

Hiding between the covers of Love and Let Die is a smart and lively 5,000-word essay on, as the subtitle promises, James Bond, the Beatles, and the British Psyche. John Higgs’s book is quite a bit longer, however, running to 466 pages (plus bibliography, endnotes, and index).

If you are a fan of Bond and/or the Beatles—a pretty juicy demographic, from a bookseller’s point of view—you will find much to enjoy here. You may learn a few things, too, even if you’re certain you have already read way too much on these two subjects. But tracking Higgs’s argument can feel at times like trying to make sense of the plot of an actual Bond movie, and without adrenalized action sequences to power you past the bloat and head-scratchers.