Melanie McDonagh is an Irish journalist working in London.
What, do you reckon you’d get from Princess Eugenie in 40 minutes, always supposing you were a woman trying to return to work, after furlough, or a baby or something? What insight would this amiable royal have to offer the rest of us? Sheryl Sandberg might conceivably have more to say but probably nothing you
Turn aside if BBC Radio 4 isn’t your thing, still less its panel games. But for those of us who grew up with ‘Just a minute’ there was one obvious and outstanding candidate to replace the late Nicholas Parsons, who gave every indication that he was immortal until he was actually cut off at the age
15 min listen
On this week’s episode: Journalist Isabel Oakeshott on how she let the Matt Hancock scandal slip through her fingers a week before it turned up in The Sun (00:59). We’ll also be joined by Melanie McDonagh who’s written about how high tea has gone from an affordable British staple to and oversized and overpriced, still
The other day, I came across a description of afternoon tea written by Alfred Douglas in 1920: ‘Two kinds of bread and butter, white and brown, cucumber and tomato sandwiches, cut razor thin, scones, rock buns and then all the cakes — plum, madeira, caraway seed — the meal had about it the lavishness of
Matt Hancock has not, we can agree, made it his business to lighten the public mood during the pandemic. That lugubrious face was designed by nature for a downbeat message. Who can forget his injunction to ‘hug carefully’ and responsibly as lockdown eased? (Before that, his regulations meant no one got within hugging distance of
Meghan Markle isn’t one to think small. In a statement on her Archewell website to thank those who put her book, The Bench, at the top of the New York Times‘ children’s picture book list, she wrote: ‘While this poem began as a love letter to my husband and son, I’m encouraged to see that
Well! The PM’s nuptials have taken everyone unawares. And it’s hard not to feel that a small and informal wedding is better right now than something big and flashy next year, as per the excited coverage of the implications of his ‘save the date’ message to friends, faithfully passed onto the papers last week. Instead:
Say cheese. Now, say ‘British Cheese’ and what comes to mind? A nice bit of Cheddar? A wedge of Stilton? Fair enough; but would you be surprised to know there are now no fewer than 800 British and Irish cheeses, many of them new? There has been an upsurge in cheesemaking in Britain. Some of
What with all the excitement about Hartlepool and the understandable fuss about Scotland, there’s one aspect of the elections that seems to have passed everyone by, and that’s the result of the mayoral contest in London. You may have missed it: Sadiq Khan won, with 1.2 million votes. But the Tory candidate, Shaun Bailey, did
There are so many better ways to spend thirteen quid on children’s books than on Meghan Markle’s The Bench; how about something that children might actually enjoy, which isn’t written to gratify the vanity of the author? Here are a few of the ones that I liked and that your children (or you) might like.
Meghan Markle has written a book for children. Of course she has. There is no celeb, no matter how busy, who doesn’t have a children’s book in them, because children’s books, you might think if you didn’t know better, don’t need plot or character or much in the way of style. It was either that,
We may as well get used to the idea that we’re going to be spending an awful lot of time on home turf this year. From 12 April we’re allowed staycations, or self-catering holidays, which can of course be lovely. But they do need a bit of forward planning. I spent a weekend in a
So, Prince Philip has died, at home in Windsor Castle, thank goodness, and the Queen could be near him at the end. That’s something to be grateful for. The other thing to be grateful for is a life well lived. More than a man has passed with Prince Philip. A culture, the sensibility of his
Who will have a fishy on a little dishy/Who will have a fishy/When the boats come in? Far fewer of us, probably, after the new Netflix documentary, Seaspiracy, 90 minutes of devastating criticism of the fishing industry. Among the more eyecatching assertions is that the oceans will be empty of fish by 2048 and that
39 min listen
As the EU threatens a vaccine export ban, is their blind panic a sign of incoming crisis? (1:15) Plus, will a new Instagram account for teenage girls to report sexual assault restart a battle of the sexes? (18:05) And finally, what is it like to be one of the last British babies born under the
You’ve heard about Everyone’s Invited? It’s the controversial new website for female students, mostly schoolgirls, to unburden themselves about boys behaving badly. It has trashed the reputation of some independent schools, Dulwich being the latest. There are sections for St Paul’s, Eton and Latymer Upper — and, among the private schools, my son’s state school,
Oh curses, one less option for the summer holidays. Pontins, the holiday camp for those who don’t mind bringing their own cleaning products, has been exposed for issuing a list of surnames belonging to ‘undesirable guests’. Under the legend ‘You Shall Not Pass’ on the company intranet was an instruction: ‘Please be aware that several
It’s Lent, and you know what that means? Fish, that’s what. Once, the point of the whole fast and abstinence thing was to eschew meat, which meant eating fish instead. Indeed, the fish-fasting association was so important for the fishing industry that when the Reformation came, much Catholic practice was jettisoned, but not the obligation
It’s possible I am alone in not minding about Shaun Bailey’s observations during the hunt for poor Sarah Everard. Before her body was found, he tweeted that ‘as a father and husband it breaks me to think that my wife and daughter have to live in fear in their own city. It doesn’t have to
Mindfulness makes you smug. And not just mindfulness; a whole raft of alternative spiritual practices such as chakra cleansing and past life regressions feed a sense of superiority over normal mortals. That’s the finding of research from Radboud University in Nijmegen in the Netherlands involving some 3,700 people. The leader of the research, Professor Roos