Danny Karlin

The phone rings at 10.15. It’s Mary, from Campaign Atom: the Cruise convoy’s been sighted, fifteen miles from Greenham. It’s on its way back. Everyone on the network who wants to go down, go now.

The Boss paused twice for reflection in the course of his last Wembley concert, on 6 July – twice in three and a half hours of an otherwise relentless exuberance. We all fell silent, gazing at the tiny figure holding the microphone, or at his huge video doubles, projected onto screens standing to either side of the forty-foot-high speakers. The sound, travelling across the arena, lagged fractionally behind the image, whose lips moved out of synch with the words we heard. The single, central figure, necessarily remote, could not quite sustain the illusion of intimate speech. But it was there if you listened with eyes closed. Personal sincerity, electronically amplified and directed at 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.

In my first year as a graduate student, I lived in a terrace house in York Street, Cambridge – a shabby, friendly part of town which had not yet been ‘improved’. (True, the previous owners had built an ‘extension’, but it was very ramshackle, and they left the main drain in the middle of the kitchen floor.) One of my next-door neighbours was Mrs A., a bent, frail, spirited woman, about seventy years old. Her house was heated by coal and lit by gas, because when she and her husband came back after World War Two, the landlord told them the whole street was going to be demolished in six months and it wasn’t worth putting in electricity. And after her husband died she could never be bothered.’

Lee Van Cleef! I remember him in A Fistful of Dollars, where he had the respectable native occupation of bounty hunter, and a gun (with a natty set of attachments) which came in a flap-down case. Now he is ‘starring’ in a late-night series (Mondays on Central) so awful that the TV Times is ashamed to give any programme details except its title. It’s called The Master, and Mr Van Cleef plays a ninja warrior – an adept of the black Japanese arts of espionage and assassination – who tours America righting wrongs in the company of a fresh-faced American side-kid. Here, too, Mr Van Cleef is kitted out with deadly accessories – not firearms, but ninja weapons, from sword to spiked throwing wheels (for narrowly missing people and burying in door jambs), plus of course his feet and hands. The first sight of the game old boy dealing with a roomful of rednecks in bionic slow motion made me rub my eyes. But no. Spitting Image is on the night before.’

To his closest friends, after Elizabeth Barrett’s death, Browning repeatedly spoke of the present as a country of exile. He wrote to Isa Blagden in July 1867 of taking ‘the three loveliest women in London’ to hear the Russian pianist Anton Rubinstein (who ‘played divinely’):