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
'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...
I have rather too much going on at the moment, including some soul-sapping technical difficulties resulting from a change of computer, and a couple of books to read for review at something of a breakneck speed (for me) – but, on the...
I've been reading Siegfried Sassoon's memoir of his early years, The Old Century (and a very good read it is). Being born a Sassoon, Siegfried was vaguely aware that he had a lot of rich relations, but he saw nothing of them – with one...
This curious photograph – a silver print from a silver gelatine glass negative, dated 1885 – is titled 'The Apotheosis of Degas', and shows that artist sitting on the steps of a house in Dieppe surrounded by worshippers. Created with the...
It's not every day that you get to mark the centenary of someone still living – but today is the 100th birthday of the still very much alive broadcaster, actor and DJ Pete Murray (born Peter Murray James). His father was a Great War...
Last night I had a typically convoluted dream, of which, mercifully, I remember only one brief moment. A character rather like Sheldon Cooper (from that excellent sitcom The Big Bang Theory) is in a bit of a spin, frantically looking for...
Born on this day in 1880 was Alfred Noyes, a poet now largely forgotten, but for the gloriously melodramatic ballad 'The Highwayman', which regularly features in anthologies and in polls of the nation's favourite poems – and why not?...
It's that time of year again. Summer has elided into autumn, and that sure calendrical marker, the Last Night of the Proms, has been and gone. Watching it on television, I found this year's event rather underwhelming – too many musical...
Lately it occurred to me that, what with one thing and another, I hadn't read a novel for quite a while – I think the last one was probably James Hamilton Paterson's Rancid Pansies. So I reached for a recent charity shop find, Muriel...
The poplars are fell'd... Ten poplar trees in Lichfield's delightful Beacon Park have been felled by the council, on the perfectly good grounds that they were shedding huge branches onto well frequented paths. But it is always sad to see...