Melanie McDonagh is an Irish journalist working in London.
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There’s a new Vice-Chancellor taking over at Oxford later this year. She’s Irene Tracey, warden of Merton College, and an expert on pain. Rather brilliantly, she wrote a Ladybird book about it, as well as specialist research, so she’s good at communication. More importantly, she’s an Oxford person all through, with only a postgraduate stint
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Nothing beats a spot of decluttering – throwing things out of your wardrobe that you don’t use or need to see what you have and make space for things you do need. I am useless at it when it comes to clothes and other clutter, but cookbooks are another matter. I review cookbooks; I probably
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It’s symptomatic of the unhinged nature of the abortion debate that an MP can be heckled in parliament – and lynched online – for stating an obvious if embarrassing reality. Such is the lot of Danny Kruger, who had the further accolade of a kicking from JK Rowling. On the Roe v. Wade question, which
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The point at which the heart sinks in this exhibition is, unfortunately, right at the outset. That’s where we meet the five commentators that the British Museum has invited to respond to the objects and ideas in the exhibition. But only Mary Beard knows her subject. There’s Bonnie Greer, playwright and critic; Elizabeth Day, podcaster
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The Eucharist has, to use the current jargon, been weaponised in the standoff between Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the US House of Representatives, and Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco. He has banned her from receiving holy communion anywhere in his diocese because of her outspoken support for abortion. She’s been sounding off for Roe
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The Battleground podcast on the wars of the 20th century, said presenter Saul David happily, ‘will have lots of bombs and bullets but we’re also interested in other aspects of conflict: social, political and cultural’. He’s a military historian. His co-presenter, Patrick Bishop, went on: ‘Alongside the personalities, the battles and the technology – and
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Judge Samuel Alito was incontrovertibly right about one thing in his leaked, draft ruling on Roe v. Wade: ‘Abortion presents a profound moral issue on which Americans hold sharply conflicting views.’ Well yes. So we’ve seen with the reaction to the leak – which really is unprecedented. We are reminded that the original Roe v.
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If there’s one company that’s a kind of stock market indicator of the condition of the British middle classes, it’s Lakeland. It specialises in very good household stuff – cleaning and cookware and any number of ingenious gadgets (the catalogues are, I have to say, addictive) – and it has an uncanny knack of registering
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The Archbishop of Canterbury’s Easter sermon was quite something; forcefully delivered, arrestingly put. At the heart of it was his corruscating criticism of the Government plans to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda; it was framed to capture the news agenda and released in advance of its delivery. ‘The details [of the plan] are for politics
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The best religious films aren’t always the obvious ones, featuring either clerics or bible stories (though there are some good movies of both kinds – and an awful lot of terrible ones). Rather, some of the best capture Christianity sideways, expressing the numinous or the fundamentals of faith through a human story or through a
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Unsurprisingly, it’s Kosovo where Madeleine Albright, former US Secretary of State, is remembered with particular gratitude: today there’s an official day of mourning for her there. Why? Because without Albright, there might well not be an independent Kosovo. It was she who unequivocally backed the bombing of Serbia that brought an end to the Serbian ethnic
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As ever, the Romans got there first. Their version of Mothering Sunday or Mother’s Day was the feast of Juno Lucina, the patroness of childbirth, which happened on the first day of the year, 1 March. Roman mothers wore their hair down and their tunics loose. Their husbands and daughters gave them gifts. It was
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Mother’s Day (more properly, Mothering Sunday) is an occasion when it really is the thought that counts. You can give your mother a bunch of daffodils and a home-made card, and tea in bed if you live at home, and, unless your mother is Cruella de Vil, it’ll make her day. When I was a
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Well, too bad Carrie and Zac. It looks like the government is going to drop its commitment to banning imports of foie gras and fur. A combination of Jacob Rees-Mogg objecting to the foie gras ban on the grounds of consumer choice and Ben Wallace, Defence Minister, agitating for the Guards to continue to have
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There was another referendum in Switzerland over the weekend. This one was about protecting the young from the evils of tobacco by banning advertising anywhere children might see it. This strikes me as a good deal more liberal than the measure from New Zealand’s mildly fascistic Jacinda Ardern, who insists that young people must never
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Hooray for Raymond Blanc for stating the absolutely obvious. He’s got an ITV series coming up, which, if I had a television, I’d be watching compulsively, called Simply Raymond Blanc. He’s an instinctively brilliant, self-taught chef, who really was a game changer on the Eighties restaurant and cookbook scene. And in an interview for the Radio
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Well, we’ve been terrifically amused and amusing at the expense of Pope Francis, who this week declared at a Vatican audience that: ‘Many couples do not have children because they don’t want them, or have just one because they don’t want any more, but have two dogs, two cats… oh yes, dogs and cats take
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Hooray for Cardinal Vincent Nichols, who used the one day of the year when his pronouncements are amplified by the season to ‘sincerely appeal that [the government] do not again consider closing churches and places of worship.’ He said in a BBC interview he believed it had been demonstrated that the airiness of churches meant they
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Christmas is coming and you know what that means? More Lindor truffles than any human being can decently put away, family size boxes of Quality Street and, for the upwardly mobile, Ferrero Rocher. My friends, I am as keen on Lindor truffles as the next greedy pig but there is another way. There is a
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She’s done it again: J.K. Rowling has written a captivating children’s book. The Christmas Pig (Little Brown, £20) is about a toy pig, Dur Pig (DP for short), a boy called Jack and what happens when DP gets chucked out of a car and is replaced with an unwelcome Christmas Pig. It’s also about how
