Melanie McDonagh is an Irish journalist working in London.
From our UK edition
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,
From our UK edition
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
From our UK edition
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,
From our UK edition
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
From our UK edition
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
From our UK edition
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
From our UK edition
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
From our UK edition
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
From our UK edition
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
From our UK edition
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
From our UK edition
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
From our UK edition
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
From our UK edition
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
From our UK edition
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
From our UK edition
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
From our UK edition
When I went to work at Foyle’s Bookshop as a student, when the owner Christina Foyle still ran the place, she would interview you and ask very kindly what your interests were: history, literature and cooking, you’d tell her. Then you’d find you’d been put at the cash till at some distance from all these
From our UK edition
When Sadiq Khan was doing the rounds in his mayoral campaign he would, every so often, include some reference to his two daughters. He didn’t make a big deal of it; this wasn’t creepy or boastful in a Donald Trump way but the message was clear: he was an ordinary bloke and having a couple
From our UK edition
Well! It hasn’t taken long for the commentariat to get over their excitement at the prospect of another female prime minster, has it? Can you imagine what the Guardian would be making of it were the contest between Angela and Maria Eagle, Venus and Serena Williams-style (or even, David and Ed Miliband-style)? It’d be triumph
From our UK edition
Forget footwear. The most telling thing about Theresa May, as suggested in interview with Robert Peston, is her cookbook collection – she has 100. Her remarks about her cookery writer of choice was an extraordinary exercise in character signalling. ‘Delia is very precise,’ she said, ‘and I like a bit of… throw a bit here
From our UK edition
Call it femocracy or gynocracy (my preference), or, a new age of women, as Justine Greening has it, the excited consensus is that we’re in for a benign new world of female governance. Hillary in the US, Theresa May over here, Ruth Davidson and Nicola Sturgeon in Scotland, Angela Merkel in Germany…what could be more
