Melanie McDonagh is an Irish journalist working in London.
Maurice Sendak, no mean judge, observed that William Nicholson’s Clever Bill was ‘among the few perfect picture books for children’. I’d go along with that if I didn’t think Nicholson’s other picture book, The Pirate Twins, even better, with its lovely opening, ‘One evening, on the sands, Mary found the pirate twins.’ Now Clever Bill
The collective hysteria about the impending fall of eastern Aleppo to government forces strikes me as understandable and laudable only up to a point. If the advance of Assad’s forces on the rebel-held part of Aleppo means, as the French government suggested, the biggest massacre of civilians since the Second World War, then obviously it
There were two items on BBC radio this morning which rather summed up the Corporation thinking about the State of the World. One was a brief but telling discussion on the Broadcasting House programme as to whether our political discussion now is getting to the point where we can’t actually air differences at all; that,
It’s funny, isn’t it, how a dust jacket on a book can draw you to it from the other end of a room — always supposing the illustration is by Edward Ardizzone. In fact, is there anything more suggestive of delight than a book illustrated by him? It’s the Midas touch even for unprepossessing authors.
Well, it’s just like Brexit, isn’t it? The appalled tone of the BBC six o’clock news, my daughter’s refusal – she’s nine – even to get out of bed, my nice colleagues declaring that they cried, simply cried, at the result. It was everyone’s opening gambit: Can you believe it? Yes, personally, I could. After
You’d never think the country’s short of foster parents, would you, though we’re 9,000-odd short at the last count. I wouldn’t qualify myself, even if I were solvent. Because if you open your trap in the presence of a social worker to say that a child is best off with a father and a mother,
My late father was a pottery maker, and very good at it. Question is, if a Northern Protestant had come to his studio to request that he produce a teaset decorated with the legend: ‘Taigs Out of Ulster!’ or ‘Kick the Pope!’ perhaps with decoration to match, would my daddy have been obliged to oblige
Forget killer clowns. Halloween was once a very different affair from the Americanised gorefest it is now. In its-original Irish form, as when I was growing up, it was an opportunity for children to dress up in their parents’ clothes, wear a mask and a hat and go begging from door to door for nuts,
Lord Shinkwin’s Abortion (Disability Equality) Bill has its second reading in the Lord next Friday. I hadn’t heard of it either, and the campaign behind it, ‘We’re All Equal’, had passed me by, until a friend with an interest in disability issues told me about it. The gist is that it would remove the following
It’s a funny feeling, I have to say, to find myself, again, on the same side as the Stop the War Coalition. But you know what? Looks like neither of us is going to be turning up for a demo outside the Russian embassy to protest about its actions in Syria, as the Foreign Secretary
The only thing to be said for Shami Chakrabarti’s stance on selective education – she’s against the reintroduction of grammar schools because it’s tantamount to ‘segregation in schooling’ but her own son is going to Dulwich College – is that she’s not alone. Emily Thornberry, shadow foreign secretary, sent two children way outside her constituency
For much of the Middle Ages, especially from 1250–1350, ‘English work’ was enormously prized around Europe from Spain to Iceland. Popes took pains to acquire it; bishops coveted it; the quality was such that the remnants have ended up in the treasuries of Europe. London, especially the area around St Paul’s, was famous for its
Personally, I should have no hesitation in identifying my favourite biscuit. It would be Bahlsen’s Choco Leibniz, which is as much chocolate as biscuit, the milk version for preference, though the dark is just fine too. It’s probably made in Germany, so it would, accordingly, be quite impossible for a British politician to identify with. I
You can, I maintain, get the Brits to agree to almost any biomedical advance – I use the word in its neutral sense – no matter how repellent, on the basis that it helps sick kiddies or the infertile. So we now have a situation whereby you can actually create human embryos for the purpose
There’s a good reason and a bad reason why David Cameron hasn’t added his mite to the argument about the reintroduction of grammars, which his Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan, sounded off about yesterday. The good reason is that it would be the worst of form for the former Tory PM to diss his successor, even
Mother Theresa has been canonised today; cue for contained rapture on the part of her Missionaries of Charity and supporters in Rome and a rather different kind of satisfaction on the part of her critics, who now have a useful opportunity to air their objections to her work and cult. It’s hard to think of
It is fair to say that I am never one to take the Polly Toynbee approach to things – or indeed, that of this magazine’s cover article this week – that in the sunlit uplands of secular liberalism, Things Have Never Been Better. But some news strikes me with greater force than most as being proof
Today, Syrian rebels in Idlib shot down a Russian helicopter; five Russians were killed and footage from the site shows people dragging away at least one body, and not, I fancy, for Christian burial. The Russian defence ministry says that the crew had been engaged in humanitarian air drops in Aleppo, though I suppose there’s
On the bright side, the elderly priest who was murdered during mass in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray near Rouen, had pretty well a perfect ending in Christian terms: celebrating the eucharist and targeted precisely because he was a priest. Two men took him hostage during mass, along with a couple of nuns and a couple of members of
Is it something to do with Theresa May’s departure as Home Secretary, or are the police completely losing it? The first extraordinary circumstance today is that police have advised Angela Eagle, until yesterday, a Labour leadership candidate, that she should no longer hold constituency surgeries – you know, that regular point of contact between MPs and
