Nigeness
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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.
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All posts (221)
The excellent Public Domain Review recently posted a photograph, from around 1930, of the contents of an ostrich's stomach, extracted post mortem. It's a fascinating collection of objects, including two handkerchiefs and a buttoned glove (this was a zoo ostrich), a length of rope, and various metal objects – coins,...
I could scarcely believe my eyes when I saw the headline – 'Lockdown could have been avoided entirely'! Had the farcical Covid 'inquiry' at last, having expended just shy of £200 million of our money, managed to produce a glimmer of sense? No, of course not, as I soon discovered. The gist was that lockdown could...
Good news from Birmingham (for a change) – the city is to unveil a Blue Plaque at its fine neoclassical town hall to commemorate Dickens's first public reading of A Christmas Carol.A contemporary report chronicled the event thus: 'The first of the Readings generously given by Mr Charles Dickens on behalf of the...
A slight thing this, but it caught my eye, and I think it does say something, or enact something, true about the line between prose and poetry... Because You Asked About the Line Between Prose and Poetryby Howard Nemerov Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzleThat while you watched turned to pieces of snowRiding...
Yesterday I visited, with my Derbyshire cousin, the National Holocaust Centre and Museum. You can be forgiven if you've never heard of it – neither had I – as it is not widely publicised, and it is located in what could with some justice be called the middle of nowhere. To be precise, it is deep in rural...
Feeling a sudden urge to have a classic poetry anthology by my bedside, I took a look in one of my local charity shops, and straight away found this beauty. I believe I already have it somewhere, in its familiar large format and in a later edition – but this version is duodecimo, printed on India paper, all...
As the BBC's lawyers try to find a form of words that will appease the Orange Man Across the Water – to the BBC an embodiment of all that is wrong with the world – and thereby avoid having to pay him extremely hefty damages, I find myself experiencing a strong sense of deja vu. This blog was but a few months old...
On Armistice Day, the mind inevitably turns to the 'war poets' – a mixed bunch, some of whom overtly took war and 'the pity of war' as their subject, approaching it head-on, while others, notably Edward Thomas, were more tangential in their approach. Although he was at his creative peak during his years of war...
I see that it was 100 years ago today that Richard Burton (né Richard Walter Jenkins Jr) was born – that would explain why I happened upon Under Milk Wood on the radio the other day (and felt no kindlier towards it for having heard it again). Blessed with preposterously good looks and a superb baritone voice and...
I've been reading about a character called Richard Brothers, who styled himself as, among other things, the Revealed Prince of the Hebrews, the Slain Lamb of the Revelation, and God Almighty's Nephew – this last title, in particular, attracting mockery in some quarters (its justification was that the British are in...
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