Melanie McDonagh is an Irish journalist working in London.
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Multi-sensory exhibitions are old hat, but in the case of In Bloom – How Plants Changed Our World at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, it feels just right to sit in a space given over to flowers with the sound of gurgling water in the background, mingled with the cries and chirrups of birds. At intervals there
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The Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities in Oxford is well and truly open; there was an Open Day this weekend. It’s the product of a big donation of £185 million from Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of the Blackstone Group. It’s an ambitious development close to the old Observatory on the Radcliffe site. There’s a large and
There’s something apposite, I suppose, about the desecration of a crucifix. In this case, it was an Israeli soldier in southern Lebanon who took a sledgehammer to one on private property and smashed the Jesus figure on the cross. The original crucifixion, as anyone who heard the gospels over Easter will recall, was marked by
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Was there some failure of communication, do you think, when the Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky bought Royal Mail (with the full support of government and opposition) last year? I only ask because it seems to have been taken aback by the full extent of its obligations – to deliver mail to every part of the
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London is full of little ecosystems: areas that are distinctive by virtue of their purpose or history and where individual elements make up a sum greater than the whole. St James’s is like that: a patch south of Piccadilly where the pleasures of a walk down the street are all to do with being able
Granted, I was not the most obvious person to appreciate the installation of Sarah Mullally in Canterbury, even though I think her a splendid Christian pastor and indeed, an exemplary Christian. Her kind, homely face radiates charity and good will; the simplicity of her speech speaks of sincerity. But as a bolshie Catholic, it’s not
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‘Heliotropin,’ said the Frenchman mournfully. I was midway through lunch in Mayfair with Benoit Brosseau, whose father, Jean-Charles, created the fragrance Ombre Rose, and who now leads the company of the same name. I had asked the question I always put to fragrance people, in the full knowledge it will make them either sad or
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Hannah Spencer’s maiden speech in the Commons – a cheerful and upbeat performance – was pegged to International Women’s Day. We learned that some girls went to school that day actually dressed as Hannah the plumber, complete with trademark hair. She was understandably chuffed about this. It is, to be honest, hard to imagine little boys
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It was a given that the critics would indulge in emotional onanism when they covered the Tracey Emin retrospective at the Tate Modern – apt enough when you consider the sexual content of so much of it. But what surprised me was that it wasn’t just women. For the art is almost entirely about Being Tracey: her abortions, her
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Five people I never met wished me a Happy Friday last Friday by email. You can pretty much be wished a happy anything nowadays, except perhaps Easter, since this assumes you share in the joy of the Resurrection. The London lights now say Happy Ramadan. Actually, if I were wished a Happy Lent it’d be
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There’s a new exhibition on Picasso which is actually transgressive: Picasso and the Bible. That promises to stir things up among worshippers of the great man, who was known for being Republican, Communist and atheist. The premise of the exhibition – which was opened this week with great fanfare at Burgos Cathedral in Spain – is that an artist can leave the Church, but the Church
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The Sun, as ever, put it pithily: ‘Andrew’s Out of Line’, its front page says today. ‘Shamed Royal to be Axed from Royal Succession’. It is one of those facts of which nearly all of us were unaware until five minutes ago, that Andrew Windsor – can we drop the Mountbatten bit? – is in
There are, you’ll note, two little words missing from the King’s statement on Andrew’s arrest on suspicion of misconduct in public office. It goes as follows: ‘I have learned with the deepest concern the news about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and suspicion of misconduct in public office. What now follows is the full, fair and proper process
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Oh Lordy. Here we go. The Gruffalo is back – or rather, the Gruffalo Granny – a new take on the most famous children’s character of the last 30 years other than Harry Potter. So, we’re going multi-generational with the monster; the last one, published over 20 years ago, was The Gruffalo’s Child…now it’s the
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Piers Morgan reveals what Donald Trump told him from his hospital bed; Melanie McDonagh ponders the impermanence of email, amidst the Peter Mandelson scandal; Matt Ridley argues that polar bears – which are currently thriving – pose problems for climate enthusiasts; and finally, Rachel Johnson attends the memorial service for
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Still they keep coming: email after email from Jeffrey Epstein’s personal correspondence, along with the almost unmanageable amount of other material in the Epstein files. They span two decades and an astonishingly wide range of topics: his Amazon purchases, missing laundry, the banning of his Xbox Live account, his reaction to photos of young women,
To the question whether the Melania Trump documentary is as bad as the critics are saying, my answer would be: it depends what you’re looking for. My own view is that it’s pretty well what it is billed as: Melania’s take on Melania, with the lady herself in iron control over the direction. So, not
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It takes a strong stomach to confront the details of the way in which Claire Throssell’s two sons – Paul, nine, and Jack, 12 – were killed by their father in 2014 after he was granted access to the boys by the family court. The case was explored in grim detail in Rob Rinder’s admirable crime show. This
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Consider this: at a time when we’re agonising about the demographic winter and the unwillingness of Gen Z to procreate, something else is going on… There were nearly 300,000 abortions in the UK in 2023, according to the latest figures published by the Department of Health. So, whatever else the problem of insufficient babies is
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More proof that we’ve completely lost it when it comes to the cycle of the year. It’s not just that right in the middle of the twelve days of Christmas, Marks & Spencer started to sell Easter eggs; Waitrose has reported that hot cross buns are turning into a year-round staple. Not just for Good