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.
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All posts (242)
'Natural rights is simple nonsense,' declared Jeremy Bentham: 'natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense – nonsense upon stilts.' He was right: rights are not 'natural', they are prescribed, i.e. created, by human societies (those human societies that like the idea). The notion of 'natural rights' is...
Having spent too long reading little but non-fiction (much of it for review), I turned back to fiction recently, reading A Wreath of Roses by Elizabeth Taylor, recommended and lent to me by my cousin. I had read a few Taylors, including what is surely her masterpiece, Angel, and was happy to discover more. Published...
Time for a poem. Here is one by the always excellent Dick Davis, about a situation every parent – and grandparent – will be familiar with: the awful helplessness we feel in the presence of a child inconsolably, unreachably upset or hurt...A Bit of PaternityTo tell your weeping child,'This too will pass, believeMe,...
The day before yesterday I was walking around the Samuel Johnson birthplace museum with my brother and walking friends (their first time, and they were impressed). One of the interactive attractions caught my eye – 'Your Letters to Samuel Johnson'. Visitors were invited to take a sheet of paper headed 'Dear S.J.',...
Yesterday I finally made it to London for a much postponed lunch with an old friend and a visit to the Whistler exhibition at Tate Britain ('the Tate', as it will always be to me). Arriving in London from Lichfield is always a shock: the noise – and the people! Not to mention the traffic fumes. En route to lunch I...
I was sorry to hear of the death of that gifted comic actor Chris Langham, whose career ended too soon and all too ignominiously. There's an excellent obit in the Telegraph, but it's likely paywalled. Here's something I wrote about Langham a while back...
On this day in 1939, Britain declared war on Germany, and we were launched into the Second World War. In London, sirens blared out, but it turned out to be a false alarm. Elsewhere on the home front, things were quieter...
Well, it's high time I posted something, but I have little of consequence to impart. With the departure of the Canadian branch of the family, and the absence of the Lichfield branch on holiday in Spain, things have fallen strangely quiet, though the latter contingent return today. I spent last weekend over the...
I don't like to boast, but yesterday Lichfield, according to the Met Office, was the wettest place in the country, with 52.8mm of rain – that's two inches in the old money – falling in a four-hour period in the morning. I can't say I'm surprised: the weather was spectacular, with fierce vertical rain, lurid sheet...
I've just realised that today is the 450th anniversary of the death of the greatest of all Venetian painters, if not of all painters – Tiziano Vecello, aka Titian.
Born on this day in 1899 (in Cairo, under the name Cecil Smith) was C.S. Forester, a novelist of a kind that was common enough in his day but now much rarer – a fine storyteller, a prolific, versatile and more than competent writer, producing entertaining high-quality fiction with wide appeal. His Hornblower novels...
Recently Johnson's ballad parody, 'I put my hat upon my head', turned up on this blog, apropos Marianne Moore's tin ear for meter. Browsing last night in a recent charity-shop purchase, The New Oxford Book of Light Verse – edited by Kingsley Amis – I came across it again, sandwiched between two other Johnson...
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