Melanie McDonagh is an Irish journalist working in London.
There comes a time right after the new year when the retail sector decides it’s done with fairy lights and sparkles. Out goes the party food, the bao buns with Santa hats, the mixed platters of prosciutto and cheese, the gift sets of flavoured olive oil and the festive cheeseboards. On the discount rails there
Another Christmas, another BBC adaptation of a Julia Donaldson story. This time it’s an animated version of Tiddler, the story of a little fish who is always late for school and who makes up tall stories to explain why. The tall stories get around the ocean and when Tiddler gets caught by a fishing boat
It’s not every day I spring to the defence of Ed Miliband, Secretary for Environment, Net Zero and all the rest of it. But for him to be taken to task for not backing the bombing of Syria back in 2013, as Wes Streeting cautiously does today, is actually to criticise him for his most statesmanlike
‘It was a Turkey! He never could have stood upon his legs, that bird. He would have snapped ’em short off in a minute, like sticks of sealing-wax.’ (A Christmas Carol.) And there is exactly the problem with festive fowl. In most cases, we get turkey. And usually we get it far too big, which leads to
Well, the pro-choicers have got their way. In two years’ time, if Kim Leadbeater’s reassurances hold good, we’ll have the option, if we tick the boxes, of ending our lives with a handful of ground-up barbiturates or some other undisclosed cocktail of painkillers at the expense of the NHS. We now know what is the
Stir-up Sunday may be behind us, but it’s not too late to make your Christmas pudding – and do you know what that means? Yep, sourcing decent beef suet. Suet is the king of fats. It adds to the pudding’s keeping quality, texture and flavour. My recipe calls for half a pound of suet (see
The Irish general election happens on Friday. In times past, observers would be marking the rise of Sinn Fein; now the interest has shifted to the parties that are challenging the political consensus. Irish politics can seem weirdly homogenous – with the main parties, in terms of culture, roughly equivalent to the Lib Dems and
Philip Reeve roams across realms of his own making with effortless brio. If I say that Thunder City (Scholastic, £8.99) is based on the premise that the world’s great cities have detached themselves from their terrestrial foundations and are floating across the sky like so many urban space ships, swallowing up smaller fry, you’d probably
To not wholly rapturous reviews, the movie Wicked, the prequel to The Wizard of Oz, is released this week. Tragically, it’s too late for Halloween, so we can expect alienated witches of colour (green) based on Cynthia Erivo to be absolutely everywhere by Christmas. For anyone who loved the Wizard of Oz, 1939 version, this is
Scent and the Art of the pre-Raphaelites… there’s an obvious problem here: how do you represent one sense by another? Synesthesia is a neurological condition whereby some people do just that: they experience colour when they hear music, or taste words – think of the Revd Sydney Smith describing heaven as eating foie gras to
Believe it or not, the most compelling argument against assisted dying today came from Sir Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, usually reliably on message with every socially progressive cause. But in a BBC radio interview, he almost diffidently put forward his reservations about the Labour MP Kim Leadbeater’s assisted dying bill, arguing that it
Critics of the Assisted Dying Bill have been warning for a while that it would lead to a ‘slippery slope’. Their fears are looking increasingly legitimate. The bill, introduced by Labour MP Kim Leadbeater, had its first reading in the Commons yesterday. In the last few days, some of those with conditions that might not
If there’s one thing to bring out your inner Herod, it’s the twee tendency in younger children’s books. It’s at its worst in the depiction of pirates. Ten Little Pirates shows them cute; The Pirates Next Door as rambunctious; Never Mess with a Pirate Princess as egalitarian; Pirates Love Underpants as… oh stop it. It
Lower Than the Angels (that is the condition of man, according to the psalmist and St Paul) is a book that combines the two most fascinating subjects, religion and sex – but you do have to take both bits of the agenda. This is Christian history with an eye to marriage, sexual acts, sexuality, celibacy,
Oh. My. Lord. I’ve been looking at Dawn Butler’s spoken verse as presented by her on X and it’s difficult to know what to say. It is, it seems, Dawn’s contribution to Black History Month. The lyrics are at the bottom of the page, though for the full effect you really need to hear her
It is remarkable that the BBC decided to give the latest PR exercise in favour of assisted suicide a big push by running it as news today that the Nuffield Council on Bioethics’ citizen’s jury of 28 people has decided that euthanasia should be legalised. In a kind of broadcasting imprimatur it declared that the
When is a state school pupil not a state school pupil? When he has a private tutor. That’s when he becomes a state-private hybrid. So, when parents pore over the university admissions and the A-level grades of state secondary schools, they should ask themselves whether all those results are attributable to the school or whether
There are two untraditional ways to take your leave of this world in Britain. The bleaker is the ‘direct cremation’ method whereby, with no prayers and no mourners, a funeral director will take your remains from mortuary to crematorium to be burnt without troubling your friends and relations. The other is the ‘celebration’. According to
According to canon 1220 of the Catholic church’s code of canon law, ‘all those responsible are to take care that in churches such cleanliness and beauty are preserved as befit a house of God and that whatever is inappropriate to the holiness of the place is excluded’. So, if Canterbury cathedral were still Catholic, as
Apart from Bob Dylan and Kazuo Ishiguro, it’s a fair bet that most people’s reaction to the Nobel prizewinners for literature this century is, who? Arguably the most recent, Jon Fosse, is an exception but the majority of winners don’t really stand up to the weight of the award. Annie Emaux? Abdulrazak Gurnah? Louise Gluck? It’s
