John Higgs offers a rambling and often brilliant meander through the British male psyche ... In pairing these pop-cultural phenomena, Mr. Higgs... is onto something. It is unfortunate that his ingenuities do not extend to musical analysis ... All things must pass, but Bond cannot die and the Beatles’ music still plays. Both franchises will pump out the product for eternity. This book is an excellent and oddly illuminating way to pass the time between installments.
An intermittently fascinating but lumpy cultural history ... Who won the war for the British psyche? Higgs can’t really say, opting for some muddy middle ground between Bond’s self-confident swagger and the Beatles’ emotional intelligence. This prevaricating doesn’t do Higgs any favors. His intriguing thesis winds up losing steam about halfway through the book ... There are also niggling errors: Harrison wrote a song called Apple Scruffs, not Apple Scrubs. Higgs is on to something here, but with Love and Let Die, he doesn’t quite deliver on an alluring premise that prompts some fundamental questions about the soul of Britain.
Though he inevitably covers some well-trodden territory, much of the detail is poignant and entertaining ... Love and Let Die works well as a collection of sharp and pacy stories, though it is a pity Higgs has a weakness for grandiose flourishes ... It is clearly true that Bond and Beatles embody different attitudes to class, privilege, violence, masculinity and Englishness. But Higgs wants to go much further and claim that they are engaged in a kind of permanent 'struggle for the soul of [British] culture' ... None of this is very plausible. There has been a vast amount of pushback against the politics and sexual politics of Bond’s world that has not needed to evoke the Beatles as a counterweight ... Higgs is a lively writer and has assembled many intriguing nuggets from six decades of British popular culture. I remain unconvinced that the eternal battle between Eros and Thanatos provides the key to them all.
The coincidence of the first Beatles single and the first Bond film gives Higgs the premise for his eccentric jaunt through their interwoven histories ... The problem with writing about the Beatles and Bond is that so much has been said already. Higgs’s answer is to present them as competing symbols of two Freudian concepts... The Beatles, he argues, represent openness and fun, while Bond is basically all about death. But this strikes me as utterly unconvincing ... When Higgs talks about the Beatles he often lurches into outright pretentiousness ... By contrast, when Higgs writes about Bond, the word “problem” comes up again and again, reflecting a tone of pious disapproval ... One thing is certain: if Higgs tires of life as a writer, a dazzling career in the Church of England awaits.
On the face of it, it is a compare and contrast exercise which shouldn’t work at all well. But in Higgs’s hands it becomes strikingly insightful ... In Love and Let Die, he gives us page after page of glorious anecdotes about Bond and The Beatles, revelations about one sparking insights into the other ... If there is a flaw with Love and Let Die it is that Higgs makes his central argument and supports it persuasively early on. He draws upon Freud’s primal drives of Eros (Love) and Thanatos (Death). In the popular imagination, Higgs says, The Beatles became intertwined with Eros and Bond with Thanatos. This leaves him without much further intellectual territory to explore.
Higgs’s thesis, that the Beatles and James Bond ('love and death … the two central opposing drives in the human psyche'), symbolized this conflict, is obviously reductive, though also persuasive by the time we’ve finished reading Love and Let Die ... Other writers have investigated the Beatles and Bond in the light of their contrasting relationship with the British establishment... but few have done so with such an appetite for the minutiae. No motif is too insignificant for Higgs ... Love and Let Die is an exhaustive, entertaining piece of cultural history, as well as an engrossing re-telling of the story of two brands that have dominated the British psyche for the past sixty years.
John Higgs is a master of taking what he can gather from coincidence – or, as he would insist, synchronicity ... Not only Bond, but Ian Fleming gets a rough ride from Higgs, who takes a lot of semi-aristocratic teasing perhaps too much at face value ... Higgs’s central thesis has an overarching explanatory power and he marshals a wide range of details. The duality may not be quite as sharp as he insists. The Kiss-Kiss is as central to Bond’s glamour as the Bang-Bang. The Beatles were no strangers to occasional cruelty and even violence... And even if the lyrics celebrate love, rock music’s energy often contains a thrill of aggression. But Higgs’s final verdict, on how James Bond will return, is inarguable.
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 ... 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 ... A problem with Love and Let Die is that by the halfway mark, the 60s have ended, the Beatles have broken up, Sean Connery has quit Bond, and Higgs’s point has been made—and still he presses on ... I eventually chose to read Love and Let Die not as a book-length argument or critical history but rather as a rambling, loosely organized, periodically delightful compendium devoted to two subjects I’m very fond of.