Melanie McDonagh is an Irish journalist working in London.
France is to institute something called a National Secularity Day, which will happen on 9th December every year, when French schools will remind pupils how to sing the national anthem, what the tricolor stands for and generally celebrate the values of the Republic. Odd, isn’t it, that this should sound so much like the reflexive,
It’s easily done, I know, when you’re trying to convey the beauty of a two-way relationship, to remember that others may have been involved in the events that brought you closer. But when it’s the Second World War, these little lapses of memory are less forgivable. In a moving article in The Times today (£),
Last week I lost count of the number of times we’ve been told, pace the Charlie Hebdo murders, that we have no right not to be offended, that freedom of speech involves the possibility of criticism and ridicule of any religion; indeed, that it’s the flip side of religious liberty. Salman Rushdie, who has more right
Why, do you reckon, was Stephen Fry’s decision to marry another man an item in a BBC radio news bulletin earlier today, right up there with the row over Jim Murphy and the mansion tax? I mean, we’re obviously interested – personally I was completely riveted by the revelation he’s all of 30 years older
Purely for the purposes of argument, it would be handy if Ched Evans had said sorry for the rape for which he was convicted. He hasn’t, for the simple and sufficient reason that he believes he is innocent and is challenging his conviction. So in this case, it’s not possible to argue for a repentant
Well, thank God they made it. The Ezadeen, formerly a livestock carrier and now adapted for its human cargo of 360 people, has arrived today at Corigliano Calabro near Lecce. The Italian coastguard, which brought the vessel into port, has been conspicuously humane in its treatment of the refugees. The newborns are to have the
Consider the odium Ukip attracts from right-thinking pundits – by which I obviously don’t mean right as in conservative – square it, and you’re getting close to the opprobrium that the anti-Islamisation movement, Pegida (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident), is attracting in Germany, not to mention outside it. For a group of
For a film I’ve never seen, I really, really hate Frozen. For those who don’t have children and don’t look into shop windows and don’t buy toys and are oblivious to merchandise, it’s the blockbuster, Academy award-winning Disney film, the most successful animation of all time and apparently the source of unending annoyance in car
When Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Treasure Island he declared triumphantly that if it wasn’t a winner with boys, then he didn’t know what boys were like. And it was indeed the perfect boys’ book; pirates, a map, treasure, a boy hero, black-hearted villains and gore. Perfect. It was, therefore, with mixed feelings that I sat
Child murder, domestic slavery, abusive families, cannibalism and intergenerational hatred — what could be better for the festive fireside than a new edition of Grimms’ fairy stories? There hasn’t been a straight translation in English of the original 1812 edition; most retellers in English relied on revised versions by Wilhelm Grimm. Now Jack Zipes has
Please can we give Tristram Hunt a break? I’m right behind him when it comes to getting private schools to share their largesse with the state sector, and I mean, properly share. My children go to a little Catholic state school in West London just down the road from a terrifically expensive girls school, let’s
If it’s all right with you, I’d like to launch a campaign please. Right here. You may be wanting me to cut to the chase and just recommend some children’s books, but bear with me. I’m on the case. My campaign is to have pictures in books again. Adult books too, but obviously books for
There was an interesting exchange last night at the annual lecture for Theos, the think tank that does God. After a speech by the economist Will Hutton which paid tribute to Catholic social teaching as a way of looking at economics, the floor was given over to the two MPs, Jon Cruddas and David Willetts.
Muriel Spark wasn’t only one of the great British novelists but a cracking literary critic and a lovely essayist. Her book on Mary Shelley is extraordinarily perceptive; ditto, but more fun, is her writing on the Brontës. Carcanet Press, having last year reissued the Shelley book, has now republished The Essence of the Brontës (£12.95),
Well, I’ve just been to see the new Paddington film – the one Colin Firth bowed out of on account of not feeling up to being the voice of the most famous bear in literature, not including Winnie the Pooh. And yep, there were marmalade sandwiches at the launch. Two things. One, it’s nothing like
The most remarkable thing about the ceremony at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday is that it just gets more popular. A ceremony that a generation ago might have been confidently predicted to appeal to a smaller and smaller bit of the population has somehow attracted the kind of benign publicity you get for the Children
[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_30_Oct_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Ruby Wax and Andy Puddicombe discuss mindfulness with Mary Wakefield” startat=75] Listen [/audioplayer]The chances are that by now either you or someone you know well has begun to practise ‘mindfulness’ — a form of Buddhism lite, that focuses on meditation and ‘being in the now’. In the past year or so it’s gone
Shami Chakrabarti, director of the civil rights group Liberty and omnipresent media personality, is on the cover of her book. She’s wearing a blindfold bearing the legend ‘On Liberty’, which seems to cast her in the role of Justice — blind, and all that. The title is the same as John Stuart Mill’s famous essay
Well, I don’t know how José Manuel Barroso came across in the broadcast accounts of his address to Chatham House today but in person the man was geniality itself and rather impressive with it. He shares the mildly irritating tendency of EU bigwigs to attribute to the European Union developments that would have happened without
[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_2_Oct_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Luke Coppen and Cristina Odone join Freddy Gray to discuss divorced Catholics.” startat=1053] Listen [/audioplayer] The Church’s extraordinary Synod on the family hasn’t gone down terribly well with secular pundits. It’s been billed as a failure on the BBC, which declared that gay Catholic groups are ‘disappointed’ with the inability of the Synod
