Melanie McDonagh is an Irish journalist working in London.
Of all the frankly riveting stuff in the Daily Mail’s serial of what it calls ‘The Unknown Queen’ — nicely timed for the Queen’s 90th birthday — is there anything less surprising than the revelation she was/is opposed to gay marriage? Is the head of the Church of England a Christian? Well, it seems so. ‘There is,’
A friend of mine, another journalist, is getting terrifically worked up about the Department for Education’s persecution of exclamation marks. He’s busy writing a defence of free punctuation and because he’s a better stylist than the people laying down the law on this one, this will sting. Apparently, exam bureaucrats told teachers and moderators at
Among the treats the mothers of Britain can look forward to on Mothering Sunday there are some rum offerings. A company called Nosh Detox is offering a hamper including something called a Nux Vom drink, and the Guardian has helpfully drawn up a list of mother-related films you only take your mother to if you
Can you think of anyone who isn’t actually better in work than out of it? My mother took early retirement – I mean, early for Ireland where the retirement age was 65 for both men and women (and given that women live longer than men, how did the iniquitous disparity, whereby women live longer than
It reflects rather well on Richard Dawkins that he still hasn’t joined his followers – the religious connotations of the word are intentional – in objecting to the Church of England tweet on Friday about praying for his recovery from a stroke. https://twitter.com/c_of_e/status/698249409663000577 Presumably the CofE did so on the basis of Christ’s exhortation to
Further proof that social media is fundamentally evil comes by way of Facebook’s Motherhood Challenge. It has been doing the rounds for about a week, and asks women to contribute by posting a series of photos that make them ‘happy to be a mother’. They are then encouraged to ‘tag’ people they think are ‘great mothers’, so they
You can expect an oddly muted response to the news that the Camerons may be sending their son Elwen to Colet Court, the feeder prep for St Paul’s (public…i.e. private) school. All those pundits who are usually reliably furious at social immobility and Tory cuts are, I find, prone to pull their punches on this
This evening, if you have time and are around central London, there is an interesting lecture at the British Academy by the admirable sociologist of religion, Linda Woodhead, whose book with Andrew Brown on the CofE, The Church We Left Behind, is as depressing as it is largely to the point. The title is ‘Why
Pastor James McConnell is back in business as an Evangelical preacher having been found not guilty on a couple of slightly obscure charges (improper use of a public electronic communications network and causing a grossly offensive message to be sent by means of a public electronic communications network). But the gist of the thing was
We can all agree, I think, that the notion of a Sports Personality of the Year is something of an oxymoron. By and large sports people don’t really score on personality; there’s usually a tradeoff between being committed and being interesting; see Andy Murray. So the BBC title of that name has nothing really to
It’s not that often you get the low business of journalism put into its proper social and spiritual context but that’s what happened courtesy of the Oxford Dominicans on Saturday. Its conference on ‘Truth-telling and the Media’ – yep, that well known oxymoron – included a contribution by the Goethe expert, Nicholas Boyle. Not a
Well, the High Court in Belfast has driven a coach and horses through Northern Ireland’s abortion law. The Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission (NIHRC) sought a ruling to allow women to have abortions in local hospitals in cases of fatal foetal abnormalities, rape and incest; today, it got it. This judgment is plainly at odds
There is someone obviously grotesque about making a pro-life statement by shooting three people dead, as a gunman appears to have done at a Colorado abortion clinic. The policeman he shot was a family man, with two children, a former iceskating champion. The clinic is run by Planned Parenthood Federation; it says it has no idea
The easy way round buying books for children at Christmas is just to get them the latest David Walliams and have done with it. And indeed, Grandpa’s Great Escape (Harper Collins, £12.99), about the sympathetic friendship of a grandfather and grandson, is funny, productive of intergenerational goodwill and spikily illustrated by Tony Ross, though, as
No question about the book of the year: it’s Michel Houellebecq’s Submission (Heinemann, £18.99) in Lorin Stein’s fluent translation. It’s France, 2022, when a moderate Muslim Brotherhood government takes charge. While the narrator submits to the new low-key Islamic regime, the liberal left collapses for want of coherence before an ideology intent on winning the
Well, the nice thing is that Je Suis Parisienne is a bit more chic than Je Suis Charlie when it comes to Making a Stand slogans, though in my case there is the qualifier – if only. There’s something enormously poignant about mass murder in a city where the arts of elegance are esteemed so
Even yew trees are at it. It seems the ancient Fortingall Yew in Perthshire, which everyone had assumed to be male, is bearing berries and is therefore, at least in part, female. Dr Max Coleman of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, observed: ‘The rest of the tree was clearly male. One small branch in the
So, China’s Communist Party has radically modified its one-child policy in favour of a one-or-two-child policy. For most politically minded Brits, it was a useful reminder that the policy actually existed. It has, says the Communist party with characteristic opacity, prevented about 400 million births in the decades since its introduction in 1979. Some 330
Quite the oddest sensation last night at the first public screening at the Odeon, Leicester Square, of the new James Bond movie, Spectre, was being at the heart of a really big gathering where no one had a mobile phone. All the smartphones were confiscated at the door for fear of piracy and the spectacle
Well, it’s something, I suppose, that the Archbishops of Canterbury and York didn’t sign that ill-advised letter last month from 84 CofE bishops to the PM calling for the Government to take in 50,000 more Syrian migrants; Justin Welby and John Sentanu do have some redeeming sense of caution. Meanwhile the 84 are still waiting
