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.
July 2026
August 2026
September 2026
Top Words
- tennyson
- birthday
- life
- christmas
- mystery
- years
- larkin
- machine
- look
- right
All posts (221)
On a blustery, rainy, altogether miserable afternoon, I found myself thinking, inevitably, of Philip Larkin. I knew his uncollected autumn poem of 1961 – 'And now the leaves suddenly lose strength.Decaying towers stand still, lurid, lanes-long,And seen from landing windows, or the lengthOf gardens, rubricate...
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, and – not unaided – get it onto Amazon. Those two endeavours were far harder than...
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 crime (as it then was). It was routine for anyone with a criminal conviction to...
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, he presented children's art programmes that were genuinely inspiring....
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 and rereading in the long period of relapse before his death. As he says, 'If you...
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 was only two years old, and his mother took him to her family home, Leith Hill...
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 (digression: I didn't know that the Tate was originally called the National...
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 – specifically those of Rousseau – than Thomas Day. The link below will take...
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 commissioned in 2008 to photograph half a dozen English cathedrals – including...
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, 'Goodness Gracious Me', wrote the English lyrics for 'She' and 'Yesterday When I Was...
Page 20 of 23