James Bond celebrated the modern – sports cars, international travel, all the latest gadgets and so on. His desire for the new, however, was limited to the material world of things. In terms of attitudes – to women, to class, to non-British people – he remained resolutely traditional. We could have exciting new things, he suggests, but we shouldn’t change the way we see the world. The answer that the Beatles gave was the exact opposite. They embraced new ways of thinking, on topics such as sex, drugs, male identity and religion, because they thought the old ways were flawed and were holding us
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