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.
August 2026
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All posts (238)
Born 100 years ago today was Valerie Eliot (née Fletcher), the second wife of the poet, and apparently the one who made him happy. The couple lived in Kensington, just around the corner from Ivy Compton-Burnett, and their paths crossed from time to time. On one occasion, the three of them shared a taxi back from a...
Last night's Gardeners' World included a report from Farringford, Tennyson's estate on the Isle of Wight, where the garden, which had been entirely lost, has been restored to something very like its original appearance – much like an English cottage garden in style, but on quite grand in scale. It looks delightful,...
Well, here in Lichfield, we had a typically English eclipse – which is to say that a magnificent bank of cloud (something scarcely seen in the past three weeks) rolled into place bang on time, right in front of the eclipsing sun, and in an otherwise largely blue sky. 'The world is disgracefully managed,' as Ronald...
Last night I strayed from my usual listening home on Radio 3 to my former home, Radio 4, and was pleasantly surprised to find that the current Book at Bedtime is Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield, one of those classics that these days hardly anybody actually reads – including, in this case, me, despite...
I've been reading Wodehouse at bedtime – actually dipping into this volume – and this morning, browsing on Facebook, I came across a Wodehouse anecdote. It seems that someone signing themselves 'Indignant' wrote a letter to the press attacking Wodehouse for being a vastly overrated writer. In his 1957 collection...
Here is a little August nocturne by Thomas Hardy, a man who has been strangely present to me since my recent reading of Max Gate (in which he is, for the most part, strangely absent). Hardy's nocturnal visitors are a daddy-longlegs or crane fly (of which, fact fans, there are more species than there are of birds),...
Well, I can't really let Tennyson's birthday go unmarked (he was born on this day in 1809, at the vicarage of Somersby in the beautiful Lincolnshire Wolds). With all the talk of this Ulysses film (which I have no intention of seeing), surely it's got to be this:UlyssesIt little profits that an idle king,By this...
I see that my old university has given a professorship to a fantasist and plagiarist (both 'alleged', m'lud), for reasons that are all too painfully obvious. The story is still unfolding, in jaw-dropping detail, and will surely do real harm to Cambridge's reputation. One of Arday's outlandish Munchausenesque tales...
Born on this day in 1867 was Ernest Dowson, a minor poet, Decadent and doomed – but he left the English language three fine, musical phrases that have long survived him. I told the story in this post from fifteen(!) years ago...
Every time I post about having seen my last swift of the year, I do so with an unspoken hope of tempting benign fate into granting me a further sighting, or maybe more. Sure enough, as I was sitting in the garden just now, I looked up and saw a pair of swifts flying over – a joyful sight. They've made it into...
Blog posts might be a little sparser over the next few weeks, as my daughter and family are visiting from Canada (via Rome).
In the chapter devoted to Marianne Moore in Their Ancient Glittering Eyes, Donald Hall examines the structure of Moore's verse, which basically comes in two forms: syllabic verse and free verse. Her syllabic lines have no meter, no feet, only particular syllable counts. Indeed, it seems that she was effectively tone...
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