Melanie McDonagh is an Irish journalist working in London.
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Hannah Spencer’s maiden speech in the Commons – a cheerful and upbeat performance – was pegged to International Women’s Day. We learned that some girls went to school that day actually dressed as Hannah the plumber, complete with trademark hair. She was understandably chuffed about this. It is, to be honest, hard to imagine little boys
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It was a given that the critics would indulge in emotional onanism when they covered the Tracey Emin retrospective at the Tate Modern – apt enough when you consider the sexual content of so much of it. But what surprised me was that it wasn’t just women. For the art is almost entirely about Being Tracey: her abortions, her
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Five people I never met wished me a Happy Friday last Friday by email. You can pretty much be wished a happy anything nowadays, except perhaps Easter, since this assumes you share in the joy of the Resurrection. The London lights now say Happy Ramadan. Actually, if I were wished a Happy Lent it’d be
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There’s a new exhibition on Picasso which is actually transgressive: Picasso and the Bible. That promises to stir things up among worshippers of the great man, who was known for being Republican, Communist and atheist. The premise of the exhibition – which was opened this week with great fanfare at Burgos Cathedral in Spain – is that an artist can leave the Church, but the Church
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The Sun, as ever, put it pithily: ‘Andrew’s Out of Line’, its front page says today. ‘Shamed Royal to be Axed from Royal Succession’. It is one of those facts of which nearly all of us were unaware until five minutes ago, that Andrew Windsor – can we drop the Mountbatten bit? – is in
There are, you’ll note, two little words missing from King Charles’s statement on former prince Andrew’s arrest on suspicion of misconduct in public office. It goes as follows: I have learned with the deepest concern the news about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and suspicion of misconduct in public office. What now follows is the full, fair and
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Oh Lordy. Here we go. The Gruffalo is back – or rather, the Gruffalo Granny – a new take on the most famous children’s character of the last 30 years other than Harry Potter. So, we’re going multi-generational with the monster; the last one, published over 20 years ago, was The Gruffalo’s Child…now it’s the
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Piers Morgan reveals what Donald Trump told him from his hospital bed; Melanie McDonagh ponders the impermanence of email, amidst the Peter Mandelson scandal; Matt Ridley argues that polar bears – which are currently thriving – pose problems for climate enthusiasts; and finally, Rachel Johnson attends the memorial service for
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Still they keep coming: email after email from Jeffrey Epstein’s personal correspondence, along with the almost unmanageable amount of other material in the Epstein files. They span two decades and an astonishingly wide range of topics: his Amazon purchases, missing laundry, the banning of his Xbox Live account, his reaction to photos of young women,
To the question whether the Melania Trump documentary is as bad as the critics are saying, my answer would be: it depends what you’re looking for. My own view is that it’s pretty well what it is billed as: Melania’s take on Melania, with the lady herself in iron control over the direction. So, not
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It takes a strong stomach to confront the details of the way in which Claire Throssell’s two sons – Paul, nine, and Jack, 12 – were killed by their father in 2014 after he was granted access to the boys by the family court. The case was explored in grim detail in Rob Rinder’s admirable crime show. This
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Consider this: at a time when we’re agonising about the demographic winter and the unwillingness of Gen Z to procreate, something else is going on… There were nearly 300,000 abortions in the UK in 2023, according to the latest figures published by the Department of Health. So, whatever else the problem of insufficient babies is
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More proof that we’ve completely lost it when it comes to the cycle of the year. It’s not just that right in the middle of the twelve days of Christmas, Marks & Spencer started to sell Easter eggs; Waitrose has reported that hot cross buns are turning into a year-round staple. Not just for Good
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If you actually wanted to create a law that would genuinely transform animal welfare in the UK, the sane approach would be to follow the example of the organisation Compassion in World Farming. They call for farming practices that ‘enable animals to engage in their natural behaviours as identified by scientific research’ (not that we
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On this week’s special Christmas edition of Spectator Out Loud – part one: James Heale wonders if Keir Starmer will really have a happy new year; Gyles Brandreth discusses Her Majesty The Queen’s love of reading, and reveals which books Her Majesty has personally recommended to give this Christmas; Avi Loeb explains why a comet could be a spaceship;
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Time was, we took lessons from brute creation. Medieval bestiaries, books of beasts, weren’t simply descriptions of animals; these compendiums of their home lives and habits, mostly derived from a text called the Physiologus of the second century, were for the edification of the reader. The upshot of the research is that we are roughly
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W.H. Auden, in his essay on detective fiction, ‘The Guilty Vicarage’, asked: ‘Is it an accident that the detective story has flourished most in predominantly Protestant countries?’ He was thinking about confession and how this changes things. In Auden’s view, murder is an offence against God and society and when it happens it shows that
Part of the problem of contemporary interaction is that our categories are now blurred
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Even if you think you don’t know William Nicholson, it’s a fair bet that you’ve come across his work. If you’ve read those excellent children’s books, The Velveteen Rabbit or Clever Bill, you’ll have taken in his drawings – never wholly sentimental, even the rabbit – into your mental world. And if you’ve seen his
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Now here’s a combination you never thought you’d see, not least because one of them is dead: Maurice Sendak and Stephen King. But there they are in Hansel and Gretel (Hodder Children’s, £20). Who knew that Sendak had illustrated Grimm, or that Mr Horror wrote fairy tales? It turns out that Sendak created sets for
