The British Invasion! by Hervé Bourhis

Pop culture is a thing, but it's not one thing. Even if you're talking about one specific year, different groups - even different people - have massively varied touchpoints. Is 1994 the year defined by Forrest Gump or Kurt Cobain's death, The Lion King or the introduction of the first PlayStation?

Hervé Bourhis's new book The British Invasion! - published last year in his native France, newly translated by James Hogan [1] for its English-language debut today - is an almanac of pop culture, which inevitably means it will be focused on the things Bourhis is most interested in and paid the most attention to.

For Bourhis, the core of pop culture is pop music. That's reasonable to me: it's defensible, and if you're creating a list of the most exciting, interesting, and important contributions of the UK to global culture, starting in 1962 with the Beatles and the first James Bond soundtrack makes a lot of sense.

As the title implies, Bourhis is focused on the culture of the UK. And, as his name implies, he's seeing it from a perspective in France. So his experience of British culture is from continental Europe - he mentions Eurovision a lot more than an American making a similar book would, for example - as well as being his own choices. That said, Bourhis does seem to have gone out of his way to be as comprehensive as possible: he's most interested in music, but he's delivered a reasonably complete and deeply browsable almanac of sixty years of British popular culture here.

British Invasion! goes year-by-year from 1962 through 2022. Each year leads off with a piece of music - sometimes a single, mostly an album, occasionally something a bit odder - as the big cultural touchpoint for that year, on its own page. Then Bourhis has a two-page spread of smaller boxes of many of the other interesting things going on that year, music and movies and art and culture and a little bit of politics (each Prime Minister is mentioned) under the heading "British Patchwork." The fourth and last page for each year is one small drawing in the middle of the page, of another iconic moment: the introduction of Dr. Who, Mary Quant's miniskirt, the rediscovery of the Keep Calm and Carry On poster, the introduction of the Eurostar train.

I wouldn't recommend reading British Invasion! straight through - it's a book of tidbits, for snacking on at odd moments. Maybe read a year or two at a time, maybe pick it up and look up your birth year, maybe leave it on a coffee table and poke into it randomly as the mood takes you. However you read it, it's a fun book, and Bourhis has an astonishing reach here: I doubt there's anyone who won't learn about bits of popular culture they didn't previous know about. (For me, I was with him on music up to about 1990, when apparently I went full American Grunge and the UK went its own way.)

[1] Not the one most of my readers are thinking of: that's James P. Hogan, and he died more than a decade ago.