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“... OK,​ there are some things Bruce Springsteen and I don’t share. I haven’t sold 120 million albums; my net worth isn’t calculated by Forbes and, in any case, hasn’t yet reached $345 million; I haven’t rocked the planet for forty years; and Ex-President Obama has not hung the Medal of Freedom around my neck and said in my presence: ‘I’m the president, but he’s “the Boss” ...”

“... seventy thousand other persons, is hard to pull off, and hard to take whether pulled off or not. Bruce Springsteen, however, managed not to sound nauseatingly heartfelt. His voice lacks pretension, disclaims rhetoric and self-regard; he is, apparently, without design. The first of these moments of booming meditation was an introduction to ‘My ...”

“... few connections between the work of his eclectically chosen band of artists – who range from Bruce Springsteen to Alice Walker, George Lucas to Louise Glück – and the specific linguistic, narrative, or political problems posed by Vietnam. For such as Bruce Springsteen the most immediate issue was the ...”

“... Obama’s biggest booster. This got him a hug from the local hero who’d always ignored him, Bruce Springsteen. A dream fulfilled, and Obama’s most fulsome bipartisan success. He’s unlikely to be able to arrange hugs between Nancy Pelosi and House Speaker John Boehner, Netanyahu and Ahmadinejad, or Bashar al-Assad and anybody. This month Obama ...”

“... Kermit is probably the only frog to have posed for both a formal Gainsborough portrait and a Bruce Springsteen album cover. With the arguable exception of The Perfumed Garden and one or two of the larger paint catalogues, this is probably the most colourful book ever published. Why? It doesn’t seem to be exclusively aimed at children. Henson was a ...”

“... of all his rock ’n’ roll predecessors – Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Elton John, Bruce Springsteen – as well as what’s best in funk, soul, reggae – and, of course, the influence of such master saloon singers as Nat King Cole and Tony Bennett. In Goddard’s music you can hear the whole vocabulary of Karlheinz Stockhausen and ...”

“... wants to get married, Leek wants to go to art school – they sound a bit like characters in a Bruce Springsteen song or a young adult novel. It wouldn’t be right to describe Shuggie Bain as a book for children, as the critic Jessa Crispin recently said of Sally Rooney’s Normal People and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. But ...”

“... like top form, while the rest range from slight jests (‘You and the Boss’, a swipe at the Bruce Springsteen myth) through stylised anecdotes (the two ‘Case Histories’) to a fable about a symbiotic relationship (‘Kurt and Natasha’). While there is much to admire here, the tone is often tiresomely arch and there is a sense of arbitrariness ...”

“... of celebrities at Hillary Clinton’s rallies – Beyoncé, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Jennifer Lopez, Bruce Springsteen etc. The French use the expression ‘la richesse insultante’. What does it mean for someone on social security to walk past shops with watches or shoes or dresses marked in the thousands of dollars? Each price ticket says: ‘You’re ...”

“... seventy this year, has had just one hit single (‘Because the Night’ in 1978, co-written with Bruce Springsteen) in forty years, and the only one of her 11 albums with an unassailable reputation is her glorious debut, Horses. I’ve known many people who dearly love Horses, but I can’t recall a single person ever declaring a passion for any of the ...”

“... a fallow period, he returned to discovering and promoting talent – Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, Bruce Springsteen – but unlike the history of jazz in the Thirties, that of popular music since rock hardly needs to refer to him. The old lefties, out-of-sorts with bebop, concentrated on what for most of them had always been the music of their ...”

“... sampler. Thus DeCurtis, in a summary of pop music as it goes into the Nineties, comments: ‘Bruce Springsteen, U2 and REM played an essential role in preserving the human element of rock & roll at a time when technology threatened to overwhelm flesh and blood.’ Rock critics love this loaded terminology. Nik Cohn has described the Sex Pistols in ...”

“... the characters spend much of their time playing video games, watching TV reruns and listening to Bruce Springsteen. Nevertheless, this is a genuine rural novel, concerned with characters disinherited from, and trying to come back into connection with, the American land: both senses of ‘land’ are intended here. Mason is not a word-spinner or virtuoso ...”

“... The former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who fancied himself a Tony Soprano boss with a Bruce Springsteen soul, endured fat jokes on stage from Trump, hardly a ballerina himself. The activation of Lindsey Graham’s salivary glands whenever he rises up on his hind legs in defence of Trump and the MAGA agenda is a source of negative wonder. It ...”

“... scandalously omitted from both the Yale and Oxford collections, and often wrongly attributed to Bruce Forsyth) for individual contributors, and what do they tell us about what’s now thought of as a ‘quotation’? Might they even cast light on the cultural biases of the Yale Book?The scores reveal implied value judgments aplenty. Don’t buy shares in ...”