Melanie McDonagh is an Irish journalist working in London.
The oddest thing about the Dickin medal awarded to a dog called Mali today, and given to animals from carrier pigeons to horses for ‘conspicuous gallantry or devotion to duty while serving or associated with any branch of the Armed Forces or Civil Defence Units’, is that it was instituted in 1943. Back then, there
Tove Jansson, according to her niece’s husband, was a squirt in size and could rarely be persuaded to eat, preferring instead to smoke fags and drink whisky. And when she did eat, it was usually salted cucumbers — to go with the drink. You know, this late in life, I may have encountered my role
There has been an equivocal reaction, wouldn’t you say, to the Church of England’s pronouncement that little boys should be allowed to wear tiaras and high heels at school, while issuing a helpful form to encourage teachers to report transgender bullying; the new rules, it says, are designed to ‘challenge homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying’;
You may think you don’t know May Morris, daughter of William, but you’ll probably have come across her wallpaper. Her honeysuckle design was and remains a Morris & Co. bestseller, and it not only features in homes to this day, it’s been nicked by designer Jonathan Anderson for a Morris-inspired range for the very expensive
We all know, I think, what we’re meant to make of the Cambridge don who sent round a memo to his students to tell them they’ve got to do some work only to find the snowflake undergraduates calling his remarks ‘extremely damaging’ with mental health activists getting especially worked up. Most sensible people will feel
There are a couple of predictable elements to the reporting of sex scandals involving a public figure, and both were in evidence when it was revealed that Stephen Crabb, MP, had sent ‘pretty outrageous’ messages to a woman he’d turned down for a job in his parliamentary office. When it came to the reporting, Mr
Brian Sewell once wrote an article about abortion headlined: ‘Women, the killers in our midst.’ He got an awful lot of flak for it, which he took in his stride. He came to mind during the screening of Abortion On Trial, the documentary hosted by Anne Robinson and screened this week to mark the 50th
Philip Pullman’s new k, the prequel to his Northern Lights series — the one north Oxford academics very much prefer to Harry Potter — is an intriguing work. It’s notionally set some time near our own, but the world it evokes is the 1950s and 1960s England of the author’s youth. The hero, Malcolm Polstead,
My old college, formerly known as New Hall, is women-only for its undergraduates. But now the term is expanding, as so often these days, to include anyone who, at the time of application, ‘identifies as female’, as well as the non-binary, those who really can’t make up their minds. During my time in college, I
Is it possible that London commuters are now unable to tell the difference between the cry of God is Great, Allahu Akbar – a sentiment that unfortunately accompanies every IS atrocity – and the actual Bible? It seems like it from the reaction on the Shepperton to Waterloo service at 8.30am yesterday. As one report
You have to try really hard to get any idea of what the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby actually said in his interview for the BBC Today programme, the one where he said the BBC had acted with less integrity than the Church of England or the Catholic church when it came to the abuse
Last December, Lavinia Woodward threw a laptop at her boyfriend and stabbed him in the lower leg with a breadknife, and injured two of his fingers. She then tried to stab herself with the knife before he disarmed her. For unlawful wounding, this medical student at Christchurch Oxford, could have got a three-year prison sentence;
Wouldn’t you just know it: there’s another row about Last Night of the Proms. Apparently the Scots in their open air Last Night weren’t given the opportunity to sing Jerusalem and Rule Britannia, whereas the Welsh and Northern Irish were. Which just adds to the popular perennial row about EU flags versus Union Jacks at the
There are any number of reasons to feel irritated about the reaction to Jacob Rees-Mogg’s frankly expressed views about abortion – which hold that it’s wrong in all cases, including rape. One is the entirely characteristic, reflexive intolerance of his opponents: see Suzanne Moore’s piece in the Guardian to the effect that the abortion stuff is
Which, do you reckon, is more repellent – the decision by Tower Hamlets, a borough rotten to the marrow, to place a Christian child with two successive Muslim foster parents of uncompromising Islamic views, or its reaction to the Times’ coverage of the story yesterday, with a council spokesman saying that its fostering service “provides a
Well, don’t think there’s much milage in the charge against Peter Kosminsky’s drama about IS, The State, that it glamorises that outfit, do you? It was about as grisly a depiction of the horrors of IS as is commensurate with British viewing standards. So, in this account of four British recruits to IS broadcast this
Sometimes, it pays to rediscover what’s already under your nose. I’ve been umpteen times to the Natural History Museum but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it properly, not even at the evening parties I’ve been to under Dippy-the-Dinosaur, until now. I visited the new and refurbished Hintze Hall and it was a revelation. The
Getting agitated, are you, about declining sperm counts? The Guardian called the fall in numbers ‘shocking’; for the Telegraph, never one to underplay these things, ‘Sperm count collapse could spell doom for humanity’. Really? It feels like one of those stories about species extinction, helped by the undeniable resemblance of spermatozoa to tadpoles. You may
God, she’s on a bit of a run, Justine Greening, isn’t she? A day after it turns out she wants to let people change gender merely on their say so, without regard to their possession of wombs or gonads or XX chromosomes, she’s set her sights on the CofE and its retrograde attitude to gender
Well Boots has climbed down in a battle it was never going to win against Twitter, the mouthy MP Jess Philips and the abortion providers, BPAS, about giving out the morning-after pill ad lib, and as cheap as chips. But in what way, exactly, was Boots ‘infantilising women’, as Ms Philips had it, by being
