Nige rediscovers a pioneering work of English natural history... The world was made to be inhabited by beasts, but studied and contemplated by man: 'tis the debt of our reason we owe unto God, and the homage we pay for not being beasts. Without this, the world is still as though ... Read More...
About Author Profile: Nige
Nige discovers that the author of some rather dry zoology reference works was anything but dull in his private life... One of my most treasured books is a battered copy of Butterflies by E.B. Ford, the first in the Collins' New Naturalist series. I value it partly because it was a ... Read More...
Nige digs out a nearly-forgotten foreigner's eye view of the British... The Hungarian-born British writer George Mikes (15 February 1912 – 30 August 1987) is best known (if he is remembered at all) for his gently humorous foreigner's-eye view of the English, How to Be an Alien. First published in 1946, it ... Read More...
Nige reflects on the power and meaning of still life painting, in the light of a book by American poet Mark Doty... Still Life with Oysters and Lemon is the title of a painting by Jan Davidsz de Heem (above) that hangs in the Metropolitan Museum in New York - or ... Read More...
Nige celebrates a gem of Victorian comic writing... Born in 1803, Douglas William Jerrold was one of those industrious Victorians writers who seem never to have slept. He was a successful dramatist (his first staged piece written when he was 14), a hugely prolific critic and journalist, a famous conversationist and ... Read More...
In this weekend's poetry feature Nige considers the use of enjambment... What is wrong with this poem? Why no! I never thought other than That God is that great absence In our lives, the empty silence Within, the place where we go Seeking, not in hope to Arrive or find. He keeps the interstices In our knowledge, the ... Read More...
The biography of the austere and forbidding poet R.S. Thomas is a hoot, reveals Nige... It's not often a biography has me laughing out loud - let alone in the Introduction. But so it was with Byron Rogers' The Man Who Went Into the West: The Life of R.S. Thomas, which ... Read More...
Nige discovers something rather strange of the Isle of Man... So there I was, reading - for reasons that now escape me - the Wikipedia entry on the defunct BBC magazine The Listener, when I stumbled on something that made me rub my eyes in disbelief. I quote: The first editor, Richard ... Read More...
Nige on the man's man with the girl's name... Talking of names (as we were last week), I was delighted to learn that Zane Grey, the tough-nut writer of pulp westerns - who died, very rich and famous, on this day in 1939 - was christened Pearl. He soon dropped this ... Read More...
There's some raw work pulled at the font from time to time, as Bertie Wooster memorably put it. And none have pulled rawer work than the Reverend Ralph Tollemache when it came to his own children... In the records of the more or less illustrious dead, there are many who are ... Read More...
