Melanie McDonagh is an Irish journalist working in London.
What Victoria is to a jam sponge, so is Sacher to chocolate cake. It’s a man, a hotel and a cake and, indeed, shorthand for a city. The lines of people outside the Sacher Hotel café in Vienna for chocolate cake with whipped cream on the side are looking for a Viennese experience, like schnitzel, Strauss waltzes
Today’s a day for waltzes from Vienna and loafing around on one of the three days of the year when people actually stop work. But tomorrow, it’s going to be business as usual – only worse. The retail sector goes all glum on 2 January. It’s out with the party food, the charcuterie platters, port and anything featuring
The BBC thinks it wouldn’t be Christmas without an adaptation of a Julia Donaldson book. This is another dispiriting example of the invention of a faux Christmas tradition. This year, it’s the turn of Tabby McTat, a story about a musical cat and a busker, which will be broadcast this afternoon. This isn’t the first time
If you find yourself frazzled by the Christmas rush, spare a thought for Stella Creasy, MP for Walthamstow, who is struggling to balance motherhood and her hectic social schedule. The other day she tweeted: ‘As I walk past everyone going to Christmas parties and drinks on my way to get the kids from nursery, yet again acutely
Wouldn’t you just know it? Christmas cake, as in dense fruitcake covered with marzipan and usually tooth-destroying royal icing, is being displaced by chocolate cake. Almost half of a sample of 2,000 people surveyed by Ocado said they’d prefer chocolate to fruitcake. The trend is represented by Nigella Lawson, who is making something called a
So Debrett’s has really got behind the latest technology by issuing a guide to the appropriate use of the mobile phone, or rather, ten commandments. The oldies are warned that young people take fright at an unexpected call – text first to see if it’s convenient – and the young are told that they should
Boo. Monty Don is retiring in a couple of years as presenter of Gardener’s World, because it’s getting to be a slog and a treadmill. But he’s already doing his bit to influence the BBC’s choice of his successor. He told Times Radio that he thought the show needed more diversity – and that the BBC
The war in Ukraine, which was until 7 October the only foreign news we could think about, is no longer centre stage but is continuing in an increasingly attritional way. And Ukrainian politics continue, inevitably, to be dominated by the war with the result that fundamental freedoms are now a casualty of the conflict. Specifically, there
In some children’s books, nothing much happens. In Roberto Piumini’s Glowrushes (Pushkin Press, £9.99), it’s like this: a father, a great Turkish lord, hires an artist to paint his sick son’s rooms for his 11th birthday, and together the boy and the painter create walls of wondrous imaginary landscapes. It turns out that you don’t
Those of us who grew up with a traditional Halloween, that is to say, in Ireland, don’t have much truck with the contemporary version. The pumpkin-coloured, gore and chocolate fest that has come to Britain via the US is gross by comparison; we had a simple version. We dressed up, but in masks and any
Sir John Lavery has always had a place in Irish affections. His depiction of his wife, Hazel, as the mythical figure of Cathleen ni Houlihan, which appeared on the old ten shilling and subsequently on the watermark of the Irish pound notes, meant, as the joke went, that every Irishman kept her close to his
Sir Ranulph Fiennes (a third cousin of Ralph, since you ask) has written a book about Lawrence of Arabia. He feels an affinity with him: he too has led Arabs in fighting, in Sir Ranulph’s case, for the Sultan of Oman. ‘I’d been in Arabia, leading Arabs against the Marxist rebels. In Lawrence’s day, the
Happy Birthday, Disney. A hundred years ago today, Walt and his brother Roy formed the Disney Brothers’ Studio to produce a series of short films based on Alice in Wonderland, a successor to Walt’s original Laugh-O-Gram studio. It helped shape the American imagination and transformed the art of animation. If you meet anyone who actually
Is Rishi Sunak the least Tory Tory PM ever? He’s fundamentally Californian at heart: witness his terrible policy to ban cigarettes to anyone born from 2009 which was announced to great fanfare at conference. That’s what contemporary Conservatism has come to: compulsory clean living Fortunately, I belong to the lucky generation that can still kill
If you want a handy metaphor for contemporary childrearing, it’s a colourful plastic box with big red buttons on it. Yoto is the name, and before long, you’ll be seeing it where you already see children using screens – so pretty much everywhere. One in 50 British homes with a child under 12 is said
A friend from Lewisham, south London, reports occasionally on her children’s state school, which has a reputation for being strife- and strike-prone. However, the children themselves – nursery and reception – are engaged in more calming activities. They are doing mindfulness. ‘My son loves it,’ she says. They sit down cross-legged at least once a
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This week James Heale describes the mess the Conservative Party has got itself into when selecting its parliamentary candidates (01.17), Svitlana Morenets is in Ukraine witnessing first hand the tragedy of how troops are dying for want of proper medical supplies and training (06.59), Melanie McDonagh discusses the art of kissing and when a kiss
A kiss is just a kiss, no? But when it’s Jenni Hermoso, the forward of the victorious Spanish women’s football team, on the receiving end, and the president of the Spanish football federation, Luis Rubiales, doing the kissing, and it’s during the official post-match ceremony in front of an interested global audience… it’s different. Immediately
So, the Manchester United footballer Mason Greenwood has not been found guilty of the offences of attempted rape and coercive behaviour that he was accused of, but he’s still very sorry for unspecified behaviour that he did engage in. Have you ever read anything more confusing than the following? ‘In a statement, Greenwood accepted he
It is, I know, a bit early to be thinking about 2024, but to help with the forward planning, here’s a film to avoid next year: the Disney release of its new, non-animated, musical version of Snow White. The original animated version of 1937 was a classic if ever there were one. Stewart Steven, the
