Simon Collins
A friend recently invited me to a Sydney gallery opening to see paintings by a group of first nations artists…
Simon Collins
Apparently many travellers now pay more attention to a hotel’s guest reviews than to its advertising. I tend to ignore…
Fear itself
‘A very merry Christmas,’ sang John Lennon in 1971, ‘and a Happy New Year; let’s hope it’s a good one,…
Simon Collins
If you stay single long enough most of your married friends will stop trying to match-make you and take up…
Simon Collins
‘Dr Martin Luther King didn’t say “I have a nightmare,”’ is the opening line of a letter the IPA recently…
Simon Collins
I’m starting to think the Victorians were right about children. And when I say Victorians, I’m not talking about that…
Simon Collins
Like any right-thinking Australian, I was outraged to learn from a newspaper that our oldest bank has broken the law…
Clive James isn’t dead. He’s just off learning something new
There must be poets writing today who can’t remember a time when Clive James wasn’t dying. Indeed, his capitulation to…
Simon Collins
‘We are assessing the concerns raised and will investigate whether the program met our editorial standards,’ said the ABC’s managing…
Simon Collins
With its manicured beachfront and sparkling, yacht-speckled view out across the water to the harbour heads, The Bathers Pavilion at…
Simon Collins
For aesthetic reasons I did not participate in this year’s Sydney Skinny, the all-nude fund-raising harbour swim organised by my…
Simon Collins
No institutions play a bigger collective part in the socio-economic future-proofing of a country than its universities. That’s where its…
Woodstock woes
Thanks to the refusal of Australian weather to stick to the IPCC script, Sydneysiders have just experienced one of the…
Queen's Land
If last ditch Remainer attempts to block a no-deal Brexit fail, our head of state, already seen to have aided…
Simon Collins
In a recent Speccie column my friend Giles Auty recalled his late father’s difficulties with door handles. This may have…
Simon Collins
When I filed my first Spectator piece the Aussie edition was still a twinkle in the eye of the then…
Simon Collins
Thanks to the increasingly infantile appetite of cinema audiences and the laziness of modern screenwriters, two distinct but related film…
Simon Collins
‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,’ is the opening line of The Go-Between, L. P.…
Simon Collins
You keep yourself nice, you shake the right hands. You spend decades cultivating the good opinion of punters of every…
Simon Collins
It is unclear, at time of writing, whether an application to stage America’s inaugural Straight Pride Parade on the streets…
Simon Collins
Like many Speccie readers I’m old enough to remember when men smoked pipes on buses and tradies whistled. I can…
Simon Collins
In a normal year, Easter is the only time when eggs play anything other than a nutritional part in Australian…
Simon Collins
A wealthy, white, male, middle-aged American Christian takes his wife on holiday to Australia. Hiking through the Tasmanian wilderness one…
Simon Collins
When Christopher Hitchens decided to qualify the title of his 2007 magnum opus God is not Great with the caption…
Simon Collins
There are two kinds of political figure who cannot be effectively satirised. One is the kind of leader who makes…
