The Great British Dream Factory by Dominic Sandbrook review – an engaging cultural history

From James Bond to the Beatles to Bowie … but where’s Alice? This lucid and amusing survey of the British imagination features some intriguing omissions

This country, it has often been observed, seems to have provided a disproportionately enormous amount of entertainment that is hugely popular around the globe. Let’s start, 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, Doctor Who, the Rolling Stones, James Bond, David Bowie, Alfred Hitchcock …

This is a tricky one, though. It’s a great premise, and I dived into, and splashed around in, this book gleefully at first. Here were lucid and often amusing expositions on the work of Lennon and McCartney, Ian Fleming, JRR Tolkien, Christie (although I skimmed through the bits on her rapidly: Sandbrook warns us that there are spoilers, ie murderers revealed, and I am right in the middle of The Murder at the Vicarage). His exasperation at the gulf between Lennon’s cupidity and the lugubrious 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, when dealing with the Harry Potter books, between Potter and TH White’s The Once and Future King.)

Continue reading...