Melanie McDonagh is an Irish journalist working in London.
Well, Islamists certainly have a useful working knowledge of the Christian calendar — probably more than most secular Brits — which accounts for the timing of today’s bloody attacks on Coptic churches in Tanta and Alexandria — the death toll is 45, and counting. The unfortunate Copts starting their Holy Week services today were intending
Well, Theresa May met half of the Foreign Office’s dress code for women in Saudi Arabia when she arrived there yesterday. Her coat was loose, you couldn’t take exception to her trousers, but it was the hair that was the great thing. She was bare-headed, just like Angela Merkel was when she turned up in
You’d think, with Brexit talks starting sometime after Wednesday, that Northern Irish politicians would have something better to do than engage in the amusing party politics that leave everyone else in Ireland and Britain stone cold. But nope, given the possibility that the EU could insist on the imposition of a land border between the
Stay safe, London. Stay safe, everyone. It’s nice, isn’t it, as a sentiment, which is just as well because it is the motto du jour of every celebrity who has added his or her mite to what passes as debate on the terrorist attack last Wednesday. And, my goodness, they all piled in: JK Rowling,
Well, Sir Christopher Wren’s epitaph got an airing in St Columba’s church in Derry today for the funeral of Martin McGuinness. You remember: ‘Si monumentum requiris, circumspice,’ the monuments in question being the face of London. Well, Fr Michael Canny, who delivered the homily at McGuinness’s funeral in St Columba’s church, said that if people
Roy Hattersley would never have been born had it not been that his mother ran away with the parish priest who instructed her in the Catholic faith before her marriage to a collier — the priest conducted the wedding; a fortnight later they eloped. This deplorable episode had one happy consequence: the birth of Roy,
Happy St Patrick’s Day to the Irish, one and all. There are plenty of Brits who are a bit Irish, and the Irish government tries to include as honorary Irish, or would-be Irish, pretty well everyone else. Obviously, St Patrick himself wasn’t actually Irish, but a Brit, so thank you, Britain, and well done. The
To cut to the chase, my ten-year-old daughter really liked Beauty and the Beast. And given you’re probably going to be watching this as a child’s plus-one, I’d say hers is the view that matters. Her favourite character was Le Fou, the baddie’s gay sidekick, though I’m not sure she realised. But then the gay
Roy Hattersley would never have been born had it not been that his mother ran away with the parish priest who instructed her in the Catholic faith before her marriage to a collier — the priest conducted the wedding; a fortnight later they eloped. This deplorable episode had one happy consequence: the birth of Roy,
The notion of artificial life created in a lab – heralded today with the news that scientists at Cambridge have managed to combine two sets of mouse stem cells to start the process of embryo creation is mildly alarming, no? Shades of Aldous Huxley, Brave New World? These aren’t exactly embryos; a scientist friend prefers
Well, on the bright side, it seems that the Home Secretary and the Mayor of London are forgiving people, at least concerning offences that don’t concern them personally. Amber Rudd and Sadiq Khan have, as was universally predicted, decided that Cressida Dick should replace Bernard Hogan-Howe as head of the Met, the biggest policing appointment
How would you feel about a Queen Camilla, as in the wife of King Charles? Personally I’d be dead against, for reasons I’ll bore you with later, but what matters is how the nation feels. Because the Prince of Wales very much wants Camilla to be queen when he becomes king. As has been reported
Is it possible simultaneously to want a film to win an Oscar and to wish it hadn’t been made? That’s how confused I felt after seeing Elle with Isabelle Huppert – a woman for whom the adjective hard-boiled (in a French way) doesn’t even come close to her unvarying self-possession. Elle, directed by Paul Verhoeven,
Norma McCorvey, who died on Saturday, was unknown; as the Jane Roe in Roe v Wade, she became one of the most famous women in America, her name synonymous with abortion rights. When pro-choicers want to defend the abortion status quo, or pro-lifers want to overturn it, they’ll say it’s about Roe v. Wade. She
Either all the critics are wrong, or I’m wrong. According to the lot of them, and every right-thinking pundit, Moonlight, the film about a black youth discovering his sexuality, is one of those transformative films which leaves every other movie nowhere. In a just world, as Deborah Ross of this parish put it, ‘it’s Moonlight
John Bercow is a little chap, and no harm in that, but does he really need to grandstand about his inviolable liberalism? Do we really need to know that ‘opposition to racism and sexism’ were ‘hugely important considerations’ in making him raise an issue which should have been left well alone, viz, the theoretical possibility
It has, to be honest, been rather hard to keep up with the flow of executive orders, policy pronouncements and big name appointments from the new US president: they’ve been coming thick and fast. So it’s been tricky drawing up any sort of running audit of debits v credits, though some changes, like the appointment
Why, do you suppose, are people getting worked up about the nepotism angle of Donald Trump appointing his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as a senior policy adviser, with particular responsibility for the Middle East, when there’s so much else to worry about it? The one thing that should concern us is that it means that a
The reliably irritating Women and Equalities Select Committee under its unfailingly irritating chair, Maria Miller, has come up trumps again, with a proposal for increasing the number of women MPs. The committee initiated an inquiry in the summer of 2016 into gender representation in the Commons and it has now concluded that all political parties
This being the time of year for it, you’re probably thinking what form your New Year New You will take. You know — the reinvention that we’re all encouraged to go in for from 1 January. Well, I have a corker. It’s huge. It is nothing less than the programme created by Donald Trump’s spiritual
