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Melanie Mcdonagh

Melanie Mcdonagh

Evening Standard

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Pope Francis had his priorities right

latest 1

The Spectator

Melanie Mcdonagh

Pope Francis had his priorities right

yesterday 4

The Spectator

Melanie Mcdonagh

How Pope Francis kept the faith

21.04.2025 10

The Spectator

Melanie Mcdonagh

Is it time for Christians to unite over Easter?

Is it time for Christians to unite over Easter?
18.04.2025 4

The Spectator

Melanie Mcdonagh

The catch of the King’s Maundy Thursday address

The catch of the King’s Maundy Thursday address
18.04.2025 40

The Spectator

Melanie Mcdonagh

Why shouldn’t Livia Tossici-Bolt try and prevent abortions?

Why shouldn’t Livia Tossici-Bolt try and prevent abortions?
07.04.2025 20

The Spectator

Melanie Mcdonagh

Grimm Tales / Children’s books are too depressing

25.03.2025 10

The Spectator

Melanie Mcdonagh

Sham rocked / Which Saint Patrick are we celebrating?

17.03.2025 10

The Spectator

Melanie Mcdonagh

Why should cohabitees get the benefits of marriage?

13.03.2025 9

The Spectator

Melanie Mcdonagh

Are you Ramadan-ready?

28.02.2025 10

The Spectator

Melanie Mcdonagh

Francis reveals himself to be a pope of two halves

14.01.2025 10

The Spectator

Melanie Mcdonagh

The case for ‘long Christmas’

There comes a time right after the new year when the retail sector decides it’s done with fairy lights and sparkles. Out goes the party food, the...

27.12.2024 10

The Spectator

Melanie Mcdonagh

When will the BBC stop adapting Julia Donaldson books?

Another Christmas, another BBC adaptation of a Julia Donaldson story. This time it’s an animated version of Tiddler, the story of a little fish who...

25.12.2024 4

The Spectator

Melanie Mcdonagh

What Ed Miliband got right on Syria

It’s not every day I spring to the defence of Ed Miliband, Secretary for Environment, Net Zero and all the rest of it. But for him to be taken to...

13.12.2024 5

The Spectator

Melanie Mcdonagh

Stuff the turkey: try capon or partridge for Christmas

‘It was a Turkey! He never could have stood upon his legs, that bird. He would have snapped ’em short off in a minute, like sticks of...

13.12.2024 4

The Spectator

Melanie Mcdonagh

Assisted dying won’t work

Well, the pro-choicers have got their way. In two years’ time, if Kim Leadbeater’s reassurances hold good, we’ll have the option, if we tick the...

29.11.2024 4

The Spectator

Melanie Mcdonagh

Bring back suet!

Stir-up Sunday may be behind us, but it’s not too late to make your Christmas pudding – and do you know what that means? Yep, sourcing decent beef...

29.11.2024 8

The Spectator

Melanie Mcdonagh

Books / The Lion’s Mane, the Firework and terrible jellyfish jokes: the year’s best children’s books

Philip Reeve roams across realms of his own making with effortless brio. If I say that Thunder City (Scholastic, £8.99) is based on the premise...

28.11.2024 10

The Spectator

Melanie Mcdonagh

The Taoiseach will get more than he bargained for in Ireland’s snap election

The Irish general election happens on Friday. In times past, observers would be marking the rise of Sinn Fein; now the interest has shifted to the...

28.11.2024 8

The Spectator

Melanie Mcdonagh

Stimulating little exhibition: Scent and the Art of the pre-Raphaelites reviewed

Scent and the Art of the pre-Raphaelites… there’s an obvious problem here: how do you represent one sense by another? Synesthesia is a neurological...

21.11.2024 4

The Spectator

Melanie Mcdonagh

Death of dignity / The great flaw in Labour’s assisted dying bill

Believe it or not, the most compelling argument against assisted dying today came from Sir Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, usually reliably on...

12.11.2024 30

The Spectator

Melanie Mcdonagh

The slippery slope of assisted dying

Critics of the Assisted Dying Bill have been warning for a while that it would lead to a ‘slippery slope’. Their fears are looking increasingly...

17.10.2024 6

The Spectator

Melanie Mcdonagh

Books / The Christian view of sex contains multitudes

Lower Than the Angels (that is the condition of man, according to the psalmist and St Paul) is a book that combines the two most fascinating...

12.10.2024 2

The Spectator

Melanie Mcdonagh

Dawn Butler’s bonkers black history poem

Oh. My. Lord. I’ve been looking at Dawn Butler’s spoken verse as presented by her on X and it’s difficult to know what to say. It is, it seems,...

02.10.2024 8

The Spectator

Melanie Mcdonagh

The rise of the state-private pupil

When is a state school pupil not a state school pupil? When he has a private tutor. That’s when he becomes a state-private hybrid. So, when parents...

05.09.2024 2

The Spectator

Melanie Mcdonagh

Exit strategy / Keep fun out of funerals

There are two untraditional ways to take your leave of this world in Britain. The bleaker is the ‘direct cremation’ method whereby, with no prayers...

22.08.2024 3

The Spectator

Melanie Mcdonagh

The desecration of Canterbury cathedral

According to canon 1220 of the Catholic church’s code of canon law, ‘all those responsible are to take care that in churches such cleanliness and...

16.08.2024 2

The Spectator

Melanie Mcdonagh