British culture

Conquest’s Third Law (as proposed by the historian Robert Conquest) states: ‘The behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.’ In no other area is this better demonstrated today than the arts. And if you don’t think of the arts as a bureaucratic organisation, you haven’t been paying attention. Alexandra Wilson’s Culture Vultures is a diatribe against the attempt to turn the arts into mediocre, unappealing, deplorable shadows of themselves.

‘Better use your sense,’ advised Bob Dylan: ‘take what you have gathered from coincidence.’ John Higgs is a master of taking what he can gather from coincidence – or, as he would insist, synchronicity. From the filigree of connections and echoes in the KLF (Discordianism through the lens of 1990s pop provocateurs) to the psychogeography of Watling Street to more recent deep dives into William Blake, he confronts the modern Matter of Britain: who wields power, and who resists it? Love and Let Die starts with another perfect coincidence, namely that it was 60 years ago – to be precise, 5 October 1962 – that saw the first Beatles single appear in shops and the first James Bond film appear in cinemas.

As readers of a certain age will realise, Looking for a New England derives its title from ‘A New England’, a chart hit in early 1985 for the singer Kirsty MacColl. The song was written by Billy Bragg and opened side two of his first LP, 1983’s Life’s a Riot with Spy Vs Spy. Famously, Bragg pinched the opening couplet — ‘I was 21 years when I wrote this song, I’m 22 now but I won’t be for long’ — from Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘Leaves that are Green’ (1966), a winsome number that was itself a cover of Paul Simon’s acoustic original, which had first appeared on the folk singer’s rare 1965 solo album The Paul Simon Songbook.