Nigeness
Nigeness
Nice
Nige, who, like Mr Kenneth Horne, prefers to remain anonymous, was also a founder blogger of The Dabbler and a co-blogger on the Bryan Appleyard Thought Experiments blog. He is the sole blogger on this one, and his principal aim is to share various of life's pleasures. These tend to relate to books, art, poems, butterflies, birds, churches, music, walking, weather, drink, etc, with occasional references to the passing scene. His book, The Mother of Beauty: On the Golden Age of English Church Monuments, and Other Matters of Life and Death, is available on Amazon or direct from the author.
Latest Posts
I've just realised that it was six years ago today that I announced to the world that my book The Mother of Beauty was available on Amazon. Looking back, I'm amazed that I managed to produce the whole thing, unaided, on Microsoft Word,...
I suppose it was a nice gesture by the British Library to reinstate Oscar Wilde's reader's pass for what was then the British Museum Reading Room, though it is clear that its original revocation had nothing to do with the nature of his...
Born 100 years ago today was the artist and broadcaster Tony Hart. When he died back in 2009, I wrote a bit about him on this blog – 'A talented, inventive and exceptionally deft artist, capable of working fast on a large or small scale,...
My most recent charity bookshop purchase was a slim volume of essays by Clive James titled Latest Readings. 'Essays' is pushing it, actually: most of these pieces are little more than jottings occasioned by James's most recent reading...
Born on this day in 1872 was Ralph Vaughan Williams, who became, IMHO, the greatest English composer since Purcell. He was born at Down Ampney in Gloucestershire, where his father was the vicar. Sadly, his father died when young Ralph...
The colours of the trees and the quality of light just now, as the greens of summer fade and autumn tints begin their takeover, puts me in minds of that great English painting, The Reapers by George Stubbs, which hangs in Tate Britain...
Lichfield was a great centre of what we now call the Midlands Enlightenment (I'd prefer to call it Mercian myself). Erasmus Darwin was the focus, but there were other luminaries in town, none of them stranger, or more besotted with Ideas...
Yesterday I went to see a rather wonderful exhibition of photographs of cathedrals by the late Peter Marlow. It has been touring England's cathedrals, and is currently on show in the north quire aisle of Lichfield. Marlow had been...
Born on this day 100 years ago, in South Africa, was Herbert Kretzmer, a man with an unusual combination of careers – journalist and songwriter. In the latter capacity, he co-wrote the best forgotten Peter Sellers/Sophie Loren song,...
'Universities are teaching English Literature students how to concentrate long enough to read lengthy novels. Some institutions are offering "reading resilience" courses to students...' So begins a news story in The Times, the rest of...
We know what poets sound like, don't we? They speak in Received Pronunciation, sometimes in a curiously strangulated form – think T.S. Eliot – or in a kind of Oxford drawl, like Philip Larkin, or in the fruitier-than-fruit tones of Dylan...
October already, and both the Rev. Richard Coles and Bryan Appleyard have posted Robert Frost's 'October' on Facebook (great minds, etc.). The advance of autumn affects poets in different ways. Emily Brontë positively welcomes it,...
Well, here's an unexpected development: a recent post on this blog has attracted 1,000 views – a figure unheard of since the good old days when blogging was enjoying its golden age. The post in question was this one – and it looks as if...
The garden of our house in Lichfield backs onto a school playing field – which is good news because (a) it means the garden has an open view and is not overlooked, and (b) we both happen to like hearing the voices of children at play, at...
Appended to Sassoon's The Old Century is a further memoir, Seven More Years, which carries young Siegfried's story forward into the new century. Towards the end of it comes his memorable encounter with a Camberwell Beauty, which some...