Melanie McDonagh

Melanie McDonagh

Melanie McDonagh is an Irish journalist working in London.

The secret of self-help

This being summer, many of us are going to spend a lot of time in airports. So we may as well make the most of it. During half an hour in WH Smith in Dublin airport, I learned to take life one small step at a time, the importance of learning how to delegate, and

Melanie McDonagh

Diary – 13 August 2004

The Pope is going to Lourdes at the weekend. But he has made it clear in advance that he is not going for a cure, even though he has Parkinson’s disease and for several years now has looked as if he might die at any moment. Rather, he is going to the world’s most famous

What women want

The Tories are desperate to regain the female vote – but they have a very patronising idea of how to do it You’d never think it to look at them, but the Tory party used, for much of the 20th century, to be the natural party of women. That’s right: women are, contrary to what

Vastly entertaining

It may not be quite true that the next best thing to eating good food is reading about it, but undeniably food writing has its considerable pleasures. You’ve got it all there: sex and sensuality (the link between the appetites hardly needs spelling out), social history, the loving acquaintance with ingredients . . . and

Bookends: The last laugh

In July, the world’s most famous restaurant, elBulli, closes, to reopen in 2014 as a ‘creative centre’. Rough luck on the million-odd people who try for one of 8,000 reservations a year. It’s also a blow for the eponymous young cooks of Lisa Abend’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentices (Simon & Schuster, £18.99), the 45 stagiaires who

Bookends: The last laugh | 8 April 2011

Melanie McDonagh has written the Bookend column in this week’s issue of the Spectator. Here it is for readers of this blog. In July, the world’s most famous restaurant, elBulli, closes, to reopen in 2014 as a ‘creative centre’. Rough luck on the million-odd people who try for one of 8,000 reservations a year. It’s

Adultery rewarded

Funny, isn’t it, how the unthinkable becomes the thinkable, then the possible, then the acceptable and finally the inevitable? You can see the process in motion when it comes to the prospect of the Duchess of Cornwall becoming Queen Consort in Waiting. Once, the Duchess was lucky to appear in public without getting pelted with

Take my DNA, please

What are the chances, do you reckon, of my finding a taker for my DNA? I’d like to make the offer on account of the forthcoming (Protection of) Freedoms Bill, which promises to make the police drop the DNA details of roughly a million people from the national database who have never been found guilty

Abortion may be bad for a woman’s mental health. Discuss

Last November, Margaret Forrester, a mental health worker for the Central North West London Mental Health Trust in Camden was suspended for giving a colleague a charity booklet called “Forsaken – Women From Taunton Talk About Abortion” to a colleague –  they’d been discussing the information they offered to patients. It had the stories of

Sir Humphrey’s new suit

A friend of mine has just come back from a few days of Civil Service in-house training. He managed in no time to get the hang of the exercise, namely, the mastery of another language. Not a foreign language, which might have been handy, but not English either. ‘I learnt,’ he said proudly, ‘about “brain-friendly

The complex parentage of Elton John’s baby

The birth of Zachary Jackson Levon Furnish John gave that of Christ a run for its money in the broadcast news over Christmas. In Ireland, where I was, the newsreader declared that the singer Elton John and his partner, David Furnish, had had their first child. Hang on, I thought. Not so. Some woman, and

Scents and nonsense

Christmas is coming, so that means presents. And for lots of us, that means scent. Some of the hopeful donors will be the sort to wander helplessly around a fragrance department, bewildered by choice until they seize, in desperation, on the stuff that looks nicely packaged. That was the route whereby my father once bought

Bad sex awards

Every year, every month, there are more of them, the Women of the Year awards when female journalists are invited to join other women for a celebration of our sex at some London hotel. The other week it was the Harper’s Bazaar magazine’s Women of the Year awards, followed closely by the Cosmopolitan magazine’s Ultimate

Who’s the daddy?

It’s a wise child, they say, that knows its own father. Nowadays, however, wisdom is hardly required; DNA tests can do the job with scientific certainty. For the entire course of human history, men have nursed profound, troubling doubts about the fundamental question of whether or not they were fathers to their own children; women,

Find yourself in Thurso

You don’t need to go abroad to eat, pray or love The Kensington branch of the upmarket travel company Kuoni has a poster on the window bearing the cryptic legend: Eat, Pray, Love. It’s intelligible probably only to women passers-by and for them, it means one thing: the film of the book by Elizabeth Gilbert,