Agent Palmer

When you want to know more about The Beatles and James Bond, two of Britain’s largest popular culture exports, and what both meant to Britain and the rest of the world, you need to reach for John Higgs’ Love and Let Die: James Bond, The Beatles, and the British Psyche.

This book starts on Friday, 5 October 1962, when The Beatles’ first record, ‘Love Me Do,’ and the first James Bond film were both released. As Higgs states, “The Beatles were about to become the most successful and important band in history. Not to be outdone, James Bond would go on to become the single most successful movie character ever.”

It’s not every day you encounter a new format to a short ebook that challenges you to think, but The Royal Cousins does just that.

Subtitled “How Three Cousins Could Have Stopped A World War,” this is a fictional alternative look at history, “told as a series of twelve breaking news bulletins.”

It has been five years since I read and posted about Earl Weaver’s autobiography It’s What You Learn After You Know It All That Counts. Since then, a new Earl Weaver biography has been published by John W. Miller, The Last Manager: How Earl Weaver Tricked, Tormented, and Reinvented Baseball.

This book doesn’t just tell the story of Earl Weaver. It puts Earl Weaver in the context of what baseball has become and how we arrived at it before the rest of the league.