Melanie McDonagh is an Irish journalist working in London.
Today, the Pope celebrated mass in Abu Dhabi and you do know what that means? It’s a mass in the Arabian peninsula, the birthplace of Islam. And for the first time in centuries – whenever the Nestorian church last had its rites there, maybe 1300 years ago, the gospel was said in Arabic there. It
Well, it was kind of Sir David Attenborough to grant an interview to Prince William at Davos (by way of compensation for the absence of presidents Macron, Trump and Putin plus the PM) to discuss environmentalism and show a clip from his latest Netflix series, displaying an entire chunk of glacier the size of a
Surprise! Prince Harry has let it be known that he meditates daily after being presented with a copy of Eight Steps to Happiness by a Buddhist monk, Kelsang Sonam. It is of a piece with his assertively detoxed marital masculinity which reportedly involves eating kale and doing yoga, and describing himself as a feminist, which
Happy Christmas…what’s left of it. That’s right. It’s the Epiphany, the twelfth day of Christmas, the one when my true love sent to me twelve drummers drumming, to go with the lords a leaping and ladies dancing, and the rest of the frankly inconvenient gifts for the Birth of Christ. Last night was Twelfth Night
There’s something about the ‘stupid woman’ controversy I am not getting. So, it’s fine to call someone a stupid person, but not fine to call her a ‘stupid woman’? It’s the qualifier, the adjective, not the noun, that makes the remark rude, though in the case of Theresa May I think Jeremy Corbyn is merely
Surprise! The Economist has come out in favour of a new referendum on Brexit, joining Sadiq Khan, Tony Blair and possibly the entire cast of Strictly in calling for a People’s Vote. It observes sagely: “no one can claim to intuit what the people want. The only way to know is to ask them”. And of
There’s no shortage of magical rings in the children’s canon, the sort of things that usefully make you invisible or beautiful. But rings that can turn objects into a pile of excrement are something else. So one warms to Bianca Pitzorno’s Lavinia and the Magic Ring, translated from the Italian by Laura Watkinson (Catnip, £5.99)
Naturally, the news that the League Against Cruel Sports is being sued by an ethical vegan, one Jordi Casamitjana, for discrimination – on the basis he was allegedly sacked for his beliefs – cheered up my whole day. The hunting sabs being called out for not occupying the moral high ground – Casamitjana says they
Oh God. Or maybe not. There’s a letter in the Guardian today from assorted unbelievers asserting their right to a place on Radio 4’s God slot, Thought for the Day. ‘It’s time for the BBC to open Thought for the Day to humanists. Religion doesn’t hold a monopoly on ethical worldviews. Humanists… make sense of
Oh God. Or maybe not. There’s a letter in the Guardian today from assorted unbelievers asserting their right to a place on Radio 4’s God slot, Thought for the Day. ‘It’s time for the BBC to open Thought for the Day to humanists. Religion doesn’t hold a monopoly on ethical worldviews. Humanists… make sense of
GK Chesterton observed that “Blasphemy depends on belief, and is fading with it. If anyone doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor.” And indeed this week began with an orgy of self-congratulation on the part of Irish pundits about the electorate doing away with a reference to
It is very hard to read the Times’s lead story today about the alleged sexual exploitation of a young autistic woman with the consent of her carers, a court and the local council. Perhaps I have an excess of sensibility, but it made me feel ill. The case, if accurately reported, strikes me as being
The indignation over the disappearance of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi has taken an interesting turn now that Donald Trump has promised to inflict ‘severe punishment’ on the Saudi government should it turn out that he was in fact tortured and killed in the Saudi embassy in Ankara – though not obviously to the point
In the final volume of his collected letters, Patrick Leigh Fermor recalls watching the wedding of Princess Anne in 1973 in Diana Cooper’s bedroom because she had a colour telly. “She was in an enormous bed, so we all lay on it side by side drinking champagne, watching the procession and the service. It was
There was an interesting article in the Guardian today about one of the less discussed aspects of miscarriage: the language employed about it by the NHS. “How dare they call my lost baby a “product of conception”’ was the headline for Katy Lindemann’s moving piece about her miscarriage, where she describes how “a baby” –
The most astonishing thing about Nikki Haley’s resignation as US ambassador to the United Nations is that she leaves on a tide of goodwill, with the demeanour of a woman with a job well done. It says a good deal about the calibre of coverage that the only aspects of interest in her tenure was whether
The great Quentin Blake, who illustrated the Roald Dahl books, has come up with some charming new illustrations for Matilda, the child prodigy who was so brainy she could make things move by sheer mind-power. For the 30th anniversary of the book, he speculates on what she might have become: there’s Matilda, world traveller, chief
There comes a point in the tsunami of abuse allegations about the Catholic clergy when you have to say, stop it right there. The latest cleric to have been accused of abuse is in fact dead: my friend, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, who died last year. A conservative Italian blogger – and by conservative I mean
So, when does a dictionary definition count as hate speech? When it’s the dictionary definition of a woman – ‘woman/noun/adult human female’ – and it’s on a poster in Liverpool during the Labour Party conference, that’s when, silly. Admittedly, the idea, courtesy of a female blogger, Kellie-Jay Keen Minshull, to put the definition up on
To be honest, it’s hard to think of a report by a select committee that is so well-meaning as the one issued today by the Foreign Affairs Committee, headed by Tom Tugendhat, or one that’s more misguided. The gist is that Britain’s non-intervention in Syria has been disastrous for Syria itself and for its neighbours,
