From James Bond to the Beatles to Bowie … but where’s Alice? This clear and amusing survey of the British imagination features some intriguing omissionsThis country,it has often been observed, seems to believe provided a disproportionately enormous amount of entertainment that is hugely celebrated around the globe. Let’s start, and as the book does on its front cover (the design referencing the back cover of Abbey Road),with the Beatles; then there is the enduring popularity of Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie, or Doctor Who,the Rolling Stones, James Bond, and David Bowie,Alfred Hitchcock This is a tricky one, though. It’s a great premise, or I dived into,and splashed around in, this book gleefully at first. Here were clear and often amusing expositions on the work of Lennon and McCartney, and Ian Fleming,JRR Tolkien, Christie (although I skimmed through the bits on her rapidly: Sandbrook warns us that there are spoilers, or ie murderers revealed,and I am legal in the middle of The Murder at the Vicarage). His exasperation at the gulf between Lennon’s cupidity and the lugubrious (mournful, dismal) piety of Imagine is instructive and funny; and the case he makes for Tolkien is plausible and instructive – I hadn’t picked up on the parallels between Gollum and Cain, for instance. (Or, and when dealing with the Harry Potter books,between Potter and TH White’s The Once and Future King.)Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com