Melanie McDonagh is an Irish journalist working in London.
Normally, when you look at portraits you feel obliged to focus on the sitter. But quite often you’re thinking, ‘Ooh, what a lovely frock.’ Or, ‘Fabulous breeches!’ Here it’s the costumes that take centre stage. The point that this exhibition makes is that costume spoke volumes about society, particularly in the long 18th century, over
It didn’t take long for Danny Kruger to get jumped on for stating the obvious. His observation yesterday that ‘The normative family, the mother and father sticking together for the sake of the children, is the only basis for a safe and functioning society. Marriage is not only about you, it’s a public act to
There’s been an interesting discussion about the Archbishop of Canterbury’s addition to the coronation service, but has anyone actually tried to parse it? It goes as follows: ‘Your Majesty, the Church established by law, whose settlement you will swear to maintain, is committed to the true profession of the Gospel, and, in so doing, will
There was nothing actually wrong with coronation quiche, Buckingham Palace’s suggested dish for a coronation lunch. Spinach, broad beans, cheddar: all fine. The trouble was, it wasn’t coronation chicken. When you’re following an actual classic, it’s impossible not to be overshadowed. And coronation chicken is that marvellous thing, a recipe which feels as though it has
My own relationship with the gambling industry is almost entirely framed by horse-racing. If I’m at a race, I’ll put a couple of quid each way on a horse I like the look of with a bookie. If I’m absent from the event, I’ll go for an Irish trainer and a name I like. My
Dirt, is, as the anthropologist Mary Douglas famously put it, ‘matter out of place’. For her, ‘there is no such thing as absolute dirt’ and ‘no single item is dirty apart from a particular system of classification in which it does not fit’. It is a label for ‘all events which blur, smudge, contradict or
It would take longer than I’ve got to comb through copies of Thank you, Jeeves and Right Ho, Jeeves, to find out the ways in which they’ve been edited, ‘minimally’, to remove offensive language, but I think we can work out which bits may have fallen foul of the thought police. Penguin Random House have informed
When it comes to Easter cake, there are two possibilities. From the home front, there’s simnel cake, which has 11 marzipan balls on the top – one for each of the apostles, apart from bad Judas. Or there’s colomba, the Italian dove-shaped panettone-style cake, with all its symbolic resonances. Not that the colomba actually looks
The insanely irritating advertisements for BBC Sounds – 30 seconds to make the spirits sink – have recently included one exhorting us to watch the new BBC adaptation of Great Expectations – by the man who brought us Peaky Blinders! It’s a real achievement to lose every vestige of humour in Great Expectations Poor Dickens can’t
Those who back assisted dying/euthanasia/assisted suicide – and no doubt Prue Leith on her nationwide tour will be returning to her differences on this one with her MP son, Danny Kruger – have rarely suggested that it might usefully serve as a backdoor return to capital punishment. This, however, seems now to be the case in
We can blame Robbie Burns. That line about my love being like a red, red rose didn’t actually specify Valentine’s Day, but it has meant that 14 February is forever associated with roses at a time of year when they’re not in bloom. Not here anyway, which means that all the red roses around are
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust is all very well, but nowadays the melancholy business of disposing of human remains can be expedited with caustic soda. I only know this because the Church of England’s General Synod has been asked to consider the burial alternative of water cremation, or resomation, which uses a bath of
What are your thoughts on assisted dying and assisted suicide? That’s the question asked by a Health and Social Care Committee consultation, closing today, that could shape changes to the law on euthanasia. Having had intimate experience of what can happen when a vulnerable person feels themselves to be a burden, I’m against. My mother
43 min listen
On the podcast this week: The Spectator’s deputy editor Freddy Gray writes the cover piece looking ahead to the possibility of another 6 years of President Biden. He is joined by Amie Parnes, senior staff writer at The Hill and co-author of Lucky: How Joe Biden barley won the presidency, to discuss whether anyone can stop Biden running in
This week we get to Epiphany, the Twelfth Day of Christmas, when the wise men finally make it to baby Jesus in Bethlehem. Properly, the feast starts the night before, so Twelfth Night is the evening of the 5th, which in some parts of Europe is the climax of the Christmas season. And, as with
Pope Benedict is dead; now only Pope Francis remains in the Vatican. And the Catholic Church is diminished by his passing, at least in a here-and-now sense. He was controversial for those who wanted the church to identify with the values of the age, and was cordially detested by liberal Catholics – I know of
O Little Town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie: except the place is, in fact, buzzing in the run-up to Christmas. I had to squeeze between groups of American tourists to get into the little Church of the Nativity, built on the site where Christ was born. When I made it in, I
When MPs backed the enforcement of ‘buffer zones’ around abortion clinics, there were warnings that the measure might backfire. Two months on from that vote, those consequences are now clear for all to see. The director of an anti-abortion group is facing prosecution after praying in front of an abortion clinic in Birmingham. Isabel Vaughan-Spruce
The Christmas present that comes with this article is an original artwork by Britain’s greatest living illustrator, Quentin Blake. By happy chance, this Friday – 16 December – is also his 90th birthday. Hip hip hooray! It is not the first illustration he has drawn for this magazine, which is why it’s very apt that
Christmas is coming – but if the geese are getting fat, the turkeys aren’t terribly happy, cooped up indoors on account of avian flu. Around half of the free-range birds produced for Christmas in the UK have been culled or died due to the illness, according to the British Poultry Council – and for those