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
On this day in 1618, having fallen foul of the monarch once too often, Sir Walter Ralegh, explorer, statesman, soldier and superb writer of poetry and prose, faced death on the scaffold in Old Palace Yard, Westminster. He urged the...
I see that another statue of Jane Austen has been unveiled, this time in Winchester Cathedral close. Fair enough – it's her 250th anniversary year, and she died at Winchester and is buried in the cathedral. The statue is by Martin...
Heaven knows how many Penguin books must have passed through my hands in the course of my reading life. They've always been there, right from my boyhood, when my father, for some reason, kept shelves of Penguins, mostly Crime, in the...
On this day in 1901, Annie Edson Taylor ensured her place in the annals of human folly by going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. It was her 63rd birthday, though she claimed to be 20 years younger, and she entered the barrel –...
In Worthing, the dogs are back on the beach (from which they are banned from May to September) and are happily chasing balls thrown by their obliging owners. And now the crows, of which there are legions, are joining in. Keeping a beady...
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,...
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,...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...