The sweeping changes of the early 1960s gave rise to a new cycle of struggle across the North Atlantic. It was in this context that the United States escalated its involvement in Vietnam. At the forefront of the antiwar struggle were radicals who advanced a systemic critique, arguing that ending the war meant transforming the system that had created it in the first place. Believing that the system exceeded the borders of the United States, these American radicals internationalized the struggle by reaching out to antiwar activists across the globe. Radicals in Western Europe proved especially responsive to the call, with the French in particular insisting on the strategic value of internationalist coordination in the North Atlantic. French activists took a lead in not only uniting activists across borders but creating a new sense of radical internationalism centered around Vietnam. For their part, Vietnamese revolutionaries played a central role in facilitating this new internationalism. By 1967, tens of thousands of activists across North America and Western Europe had come together in a new radical international.

Chapters 4 and 5 examine Dylan’s and Lennon’s conspicuous and copious allusions to events, characters and literature from the past using a framework inspired by the Marxist historiography of Fredric Jameson (2011). Together they reveal the similarities and dissimilarities between Dylan’s and Lennon’s worldview, and show how each artist’s appreciation of history informed their work. Chapter 4 discusses how Lennon’s colonial nostalgia coincided with the Beatles’ propulsion to international stardom during the dissolution of the British Empire, and was further complicated by his predilection for transgressive humour – which included ironic Nazi salutes before vast open-air crowds and acts of grotesque mimicry while performing onstage. Both chapters explore the basis for their subject’s historical awareness and show how it found expression in their work.

This chapter introduces Eloise Knapp Hay’s (1984) concept of dual biography and explains why Dylan and Lennon are such appropriate subjects. It examines their known meetings, intertextual references, reciprocal influences and other forms of interaction. As the dual biography unfolds it elicits findings that a study of each performer alone could not disclose. The cultural mythology around their fleeting encounters, such as when Dylan apparently introduced the Beatles to marijuana or when Dylan and Lennon filmed a cinéma vérité scene together, demonstrates the symbiotic nature of their ongoing relationship.

Come the middle of the 1960s, the moral vigilante system of the British establishment collapsed. This chapter chronicles how this came about. It was instigated partly through the demise of the Public Morality Council and its reincarnation as the Social Morality Council under the guidance of the Roman Catholic Church. The evidence is given here for regarding this as something of a putsch, organised by Edward Oliver who deliberately dismantled the PMC and, against the wishes of the Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey, reinvented it as an organisation with international and educational agendas. Vigilantism was then picked up by new leaders – Mary Whitehouse, Lord Longford and Moral Rearmament. This amounted to a privatisation of vigilantism, with pirates who stole it from the mainstream churches. This transformation of the landscape of religious morality thus produced a system divorced from the British establishment.