Melanie McDonagh is an Irish journalist working in London.
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At this time of year you’ve probably had it with festive planners, Christmas countdowns and those magazine features about what presents to buy — as if picking presents, rather than paying for them, were the problem. So when I say that the Christmas season is actually too short, and that we should round it off
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Michael Gove has said that ‘nothing is off the table’ when it comes to dealing with the revelations in today’s Telegraph that a chief examiner of the Welsh examination board, WJEC, steered teachers attending his board’s fee-paying advice session so flagrantly in the direction of what was likely to feature in the next examination, it
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The truth is, we could probably all get by with three or four cookbooks; half a dozen at most, which makes my own collection of dozens seem a bit OTT. But what you need among them is a book that covers all the essentials, so that if you’re stuck to know what to do with
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It’s not going to happen. That’s what everyone says who knows anything about the subject that we’re going to be hearing quite a bit about this week: Turkey’s membership of the EU. I’ve heard it from someone who works for William Hague, from a political editor, from a diplomat. Which makes this week’s state visit
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It’s tempting to respond to the BMA’s extraordinary proposal to ban smoking in cars with a Thin End of the Wedge argument. Ban smoking even on the part of an unaccompanied adult, sitting in a car by the side of the road? How long before they’re banning it in the home, eh? But hold it
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In one Capuchin monastery in Sicily, the so-called Palermo Catacombs, locals used to buy a niche where their mummified corpse would one day stand erect, clothed and on display to visitors, the way we might now buy a burial plot. Would-be purchasers would pay a visit to select their niche and stand in it to
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Well, the oldie got it. Michael D. Higgins — commonly known as Michael D — has all but won the Irish presidential election. The little man who resembles a bard or a leprechaun, depending on your point of view, appears to have beaten off six undistinguished competitors to succeed the formidable Mary McAleese. At 70,
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It’s hard to stop quoting Flann O’Brien, once you start. The Irish man of letters was born a hundred years ago and to celebrate the centenary there are at least three conferences in his honour, the latest of which takes place this weekend at the Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith, with another in the Irish
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The correct response to the film One Day is, apparently, to cry your eyes out. Me, I couldn’t squeeze a single tear; in fact the sentiment I could barely suppress throughout was rising irritation. If ever two characters needed a slap it’s the hero and heroine of One Day. Let me explain. This is a
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This being summer, many of us are going to spend a lot of time in airports. So we may as well make the most of it. During half an hour in WH Smith in Dublin airport, I learned to take life one small step at a time, the importance of learning how to delegate, and
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The Tories are desperate to regain the female vote – but they have a very patronising idea of how to do it You’d never think it to look at them, but the Tory party used, for much of the 20th century, to be the natural party of women. That’s right: women are, contrary to what
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It may not be quite true that the next best thing to eating good food is reading about it, but undeniably food writing has its considerable pleasures. You’ve got it all there: sex and sensuality (the link between the appetites hardly needs spelling out), social history, the loving acquaintance with ingredients . . . and
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In July, the world’s most famous restaurant, elBulli, closes, to reopen in 2014 as a ‘creative centre’. Rough luck on the million-odd people who try for one of 8,000 reservations a year. It’s also a blow for the eponymous young cooks of Lisa Abend’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentices (Simon & Schuster, £18.99), the 45 stagiaires who
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Melanie McDonagh has written the Bookend column in this week’s issue of the Spectator. Here it is for readers of this blog. In July, the world’s most famous restaurant, elBulli, closes, to reopen in 2014 as a ‘creative centre’. Rough luck on the million-odd people who try for one of 8,000 reservations a year. It’s
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Funny, isn’t it, how the unthinkable becomes the thinkable, then the possible, then the acceptable and finally the inevitable? You can see the process in motion when it comes to the prospect of the Duchess of Cornwall becoming Queen Consort in Waiting. Once, the Duchess was lucky to appear in public without getting pelted with
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What are the chances, do you reckon, of my finding a taker for my DNA? I’d like to make the offer on account of the forthcoming (Protection of) Freedoms Bill, which promises to make the police drop the DNA details of roughly a million people from the national database who have never been found guilty
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Last November, Margaret Forrester, a mental health worker for the Central North West London Mental Health Trust in Camden was suspended for giving a colleague a charity booklet called “Forsaken – Women From Taunton Talk About Abortion” to a colleague – they’d been discussing the information they offered to patients. It had the stories of
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A friend of mine has just come back from a few days of Civil Service in-house training. He managed in no time to get the hang of the exercise, namely, the mastery of another language. Not a foreign language, which might have been handy, but not English either. ‘I learnt,’ he said proudly, ‘about “brain-friendly
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The good news is that most people in Britain think that people in their local area mix pretty well regardless of differences in race, religion and the rest of it. According to the latest Citizenship Survey from the Department for Communities and Local Government for April-September last year, about 85 percent of people think that
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So, it seems that Lauren Booth, sister-in-law to Tony Blair, isn’t so much a slightly tiresome attention seeker as bang on trend. By converting to Islam, as she very publicly did last year, she’s put a face to the growing numbers of white Britons who have become Muslims, a group that last week was estimated
