The Beatles’ movie Help! featured crude racial stereotypes – but it shouldn’t be hidden away

The Beatles’ movie Help! featured crude racial stereotypes – but it shouldn’t be hidden away

I sometimes think that my teenage fascination with the Beatles is what drew me to becoming a professional historian. Piecing together what I could find out about them in the years before the internet was a sort of gateway to the history of Britain and the world in the decade in which I was born – Carnaby Street, the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon and counter-cultural figures like Timothy Leary. The original Beatles Anthology released in 1995 in the …