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
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
My friend the Emily Dickinson maven sends me many a Dickinson gem that I've never come across before (I came late to her poetry). One of the latest was this November poem, with its startling final image – who but Emily Dickinson could...
The great Venetian genre painter Pietro Longhi, born on this day in 1701, painted mostly indoor scenes – including his famous Exhibition of a Rhinoceros in Venice – but he sometimes ventured outdoors, as in this typically cheery scene of...
On this day in 1957 a mongrel from the streets of Moscow was launched into orbit around the Earth, strapped into the Soviet spacecraft Sputnik 2 – the first dog in space. Laika, as she was named, was never going to survive the journey,...
I noticed this morning that the front page of one of the nationals claimed that the Lichfield heckle was the 'last straw' for the King, and stung him into decisive action, banishing his brother, the erstwhile Duke of York and Prince...
Halloween, Schmalloween – here at Nigeness, 31st October is always Keats's birthday (born 1795, in Moorgate, London, where his father was ostler at the Swan and Hoop inn). On this day in 1818, Keats signed off on his long letter to his...