Nige recommends Jonathan Raban's account of the praire homesteaders... Mixing history with reportage, travelogue, reconstruction and personal narrative, Jonathan Raban's wonderful book Bad Land (available for 1p here) tells the story of the homesteaders who came to settle on the all but unpopulated prairies of Montana in the teens of the 20th ... Read More...
About Author Profile: Nige
It has inspired countless cheesy posters and a few alarming records. But, finds Nige, the poem Desiderata is worth a second look... Born on this day in 1872 was the American writer and attorney Max Ehrmann, one of those cases - like Joseph Blanco White - of a writer remembered for just ... Read More...
Nige recommends a lesser known novel by My Antonia author Willa Cather... A Lost Lady by Willa Cather [available for a penny from Amazon] is an apparently slight novel of some 160 pages that achieves the kind of depth and makes the kind of impact you'd expect from something twice the length. It's ... Read More...
Nige introduces Edward Gordon Craig, the prodigiously talented but now virtually forgotten stage designer, actor, artist, musician and womaniser... About this time last year I spent a couple of days in my favourite corner of Derbyshire, where, as usual, I called in on my favourite bookshop (The Bookshop in Wirksworth) and, ... Read More...
Nige remembers a once hugely popular 'comedian'... This month sees the 127th edition of the Scarborough Cricket Festival... Ah the memories...Back in my boyhood days, I'd often be there, with my brother, neatly clad in our little sports jackets, enjoying the beautiful airy seaside ground, the comings and goings, the old ... Read More...
There are countless overlooked books that deserve greater recognition - and many of them can be snapped up for a penny online. Here Nige recommends a classic novella... Janet Loxley Lewis was the wife of the eminent critic Yvor Winters, and a considerable poet and novelist in her own right. The Wife of ... Read More...
'If he hadn't existed, a satirical novelist would surely have invented him' - Nige on the popular philosopher C.E.M Joad... As well as being a 'botanophile' (as he terms it, to distinguish himself from a proper botanist), Jocelyn Brooke was also a keen maker of fireworks, an interest he developed while ... Read More...
In which Nige goes for a walk in the Surrey Hills... Against the hot blue sky, the terraced knoll loomed enormous, its summit lost in a shimmering heat-haze. The grassy flanks seemed to radiate a reflected heat, enfolding us in a weighted, thyme-scented silence, enhanced rather than disturbed by the monotone ... Read More...
The more Nige reads of Violet Trefusis, Vita Sackville West and Virginia Woolf in this excellent group biography, the more appalling they seem... The biography business - driven by modern research and documentation methods, publishers' demand for fat volumes, and the ever-grinding mills of Academe - does have a tendency to ... Read More...
With Wimbledon getting underway once more, Nige takes a look back at one of tennis's greatest stars... The glamorous, exuberant French tennis player Suzanne Lenglen died in 1938, aged just 39. She died of pernicious anaemia, having been diagnosed with leukaemia, and lost her sight shortly before her death - the ... Read More...
