Melanie McDonagh is an Irish journalist working in London.
It’s not that often you get the low business of journalism put into its proper social and spiritual context but that’s what happened courtesy of the Oxford Dominicans on Saturday. Its conference on ‘Truth-telling and the Media’ – yep, that well known oxymoron – included a contribution by the Goethe expert, Nicholas Boyle. Not a
Well, the High Court in Belfast has driven a coach and horses through Northern Ireland’s abortion law. The Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission (NIHRC) sought a ruling to allow women to have abortions in local hospitals in cases of fatal foetal abnormalities, rape and incest; today, it got it. This judgment is plainly at odds
There is someone obviously grotesque about making a pro-life statement by shooting three people dead, as a gunman appears to have done at a Colorado abortion clinic. The policeman he shot was a family man, with two children, a former iceskating champion. The clinic is run by Planned Parenthood Federation; it says it has no idea
The easy way round buying books for children at Christmas is just to get them the latest David Walliams and have done with it. And indeed, Grandpa’s Great Escape (Harper Collins, £12.99), about the sympathetic friendship of a grandfather and grandson, is funny, productive of intergenerational goodwill and spikily illustrated by Tony Ross, though, as
No question about the book of the year: it’s Michel Houellebecq’s Submission (Heinemann, £18.99) in Lorin Stein’s fluent translation. It’s France, 2022, when a moderate Muslim Brotherhood government takes charge. While the narrator submits to the new low-key Islamic regime, the liberal left collapses for want of coherence before an ideology intent on winning the
Well, the nice thing is that Je Suis Parisienne is a bit more chic than Je Suis Charlie when it comes to Making a Stand slogans, though in my case there is the qualifier – if only. There’s something enormously poignant about mass murder in a city where the arts of elegance are esteemed so
Even yew trees are at it. It seems the ancient Fortingall Yew in Perthshire, which everyone had assumed to be male, is bearing berries and is therefore, at least in part, female. Dr Max Coleman of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, observed: ‘The rest of the tree was clearly male. One small branch in the
So, China’s Communist Party has radically modified its one-child policy in favour of a one-or-two-child policy. For most politically minded Brits, it was a useful reminder that the policy actually existed. It has, says the Communist party with characteristic opacity, prevented about 400 million births in the decades since its introduction in 1979. Some 330
Quite the oddest sensation last night at the first public screening at the Odeon, Leicester Square, of the new James Bond movie, Spectre, was being at the heart of a really big gathering where no one had a mobile phone. All the smartphones were confiscated at the door for fear of piracy and the spectacle
Well, it’s something, I suppose, that the Archbishops of Canterbury and York didn’t sign that ill-advised letter last month from 84 CofE bishops to the PM calling for the Government to take in 50,000 more Syrian migrants; Justin Welby and John Sentanu do have some redeeming sense of caution. Meanwhile the 84 are still waiting
You might have thought, mightn’t you, that a million arrivals in a year to a single European country, Germany – well, more than 800,000 and counting – would be enough to be going on with, wouldn’t you? After that, you wouldn’t actually be going out of your way to solicit more incomers into Europe in
You know all that stuff about ‘safe spaces’, places on university campuses where you’re not allowed to say or do anything mean or that could possibly be construed as mean about anyone in case it hurts people’s feelings, especially if you’re a minority of some description? Well, I got the chance to try it out
Well, the Vatican isn’t the place I know a bit if the sexual orientation of the Polish priest who’s just outed himself as gay wasn’t known to everyone from the Swiss Guard to the cleaners. But still, for Mgr Krzysztof Charamsa to declare in a press conference not just that he’s homosexual but actually in
Gosh, she’s done well out of notoriety, has Charlotte Proudman. After emerging from entire obscurity after outing an older male barrister for inappropriate remarks about her photo on LinkedIn – I don’t need to remind you about it, do I? – this young lawyer has now come into her own as a columnist on the
Just a thought: what if Aylan Kurdi, the poor drowned three year old child whose picture changed Europe – we are told – when it comes to the fate of Syrian refugees, had been, say, Afghan rather than Syrian? Or Eritrean, or indeed Pakistani? Quite possible, you know. Perhaps half of the migrants coming to
You know, when gay marriage legislation was going through parliament and Christian campaigners were warning about the possibility that those with a conscientious objection to gay marriage would find themselves at a disadvantage in public life – especially teachers – I honestly thought that it would take some time to happen. You might have some nutty
It’s the 150th anniversary of Alice in Wonderland — cue an explosion of editions of the book, a new biography of Lewis Carroll, make-and-do books, jigsaw puzzles and general Alice overload. In a way, it’s all dandy. Alice is part of our collective consciousness, even though for modern children it’s chiefly through the medium of
The question is, says the Guardian in a report from San Francisco, whether God is actually gay, what with the gay marriage movement being on such a roll. The US Supreme Court majority ruling that marriage between same-sex couples is a constitutional right usefully coincided with a similar ruling on gay marriage in Mexico, which makes a
Question: which comes out worse from the Tim Hunt affair – the lynch mob on Twitter which brought him down, or University College London, which pulled the rug from under both him and his immunologist wife once they gathered that one of their own had said something off message? It’s a tough call, but I
Well, as a mere PR exercise, the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, awarded last night, has done really well, what with the American woman from Diageo (owner of Baileys) causing Ian Hislop to fall asleep while standing up during her speech. I haven’t a clue whether Ali Smith’s book, How To Be Both, about sexuality-shifting,
