If ever a man deserved his gong, it’s Sir Alastair Cook
Here’s a date for the diary: if you’re in south London on 11 April, head for the Oval. It’s going…
Dear Mary: How do I get an answer from my elusive publisher?
Q. What is the current etiquette regarding chasing an opinion from a publisher to whom, by agreement and via a…
This is a restaurant for affluent halfwits: Bob Bob Ricard reviewed
In January, you could go to Bob Bob Ricard in Soho. I do not know why it is called Bob…
Illeism: the weird habit of talking about oneself in the third person
Someone has been putting about reports that Sajid Javid, the Home Secretary, refers to himself in the third person as…
Wozzeck
The story is bleak, very bleak; the music bleak and very loud, yet Wozzeck is regarded as an outstanding 20th…
Identity notes
Colourful opinions In the last edition of the Saturday Paper for 2018 there is an article by a self-styled ‘Person…
Simon Collins
If you still haven’t got around to making a New Year’s resolution, why not make one you won’t be able…
Brown study
Here at the United Nations Cultural Reform Centre we are working on a major project that will help deliver us…
Brexit notes
Parris and the mob No doubt many readers viewed with incredulity Speccie columnist Matthew Parris’s nostalgia for the democratic process…
Australian notes
How on earth can we ensure that 2019 is a more positive and constructive year than the last one? Australia…
Conservative notes
Lefty Tory Brits Arriving in London for a posting at Australia House during the dying days of the Blair government,…
Free speech beached
Let’s start by stating the bleeding obvious. The organisers of any ‘right-wing’ rally that allow or fail to prevent a…
Shame, shame, shame on New Zealand
Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel once famously wrote ‘what hurts the victim most is not the cruelty of the oppressor, but…
One-way hate speech
Britain is allowing political correctness, or fear of political incorrectness, increasingly to destroy its civil liberties and silence freedom of…
Foreign aid, feminist propaganda
‘Where are the women business leaders in Vietnam?’. It sounds like a question at a pub trivia night. The answer…
Of the people
This must be the first occasion when a book on politics, written in Australia, has been listed among the year’s…
DFAT deception on Kokoda
Community Museums and Trade Centres under construction along the Kokoda Trail are the latest taxpayer funded folly of our so-called…
Third party insurance against another decade of political failure
Economic and social decline looks set-in as our lost political decade morphs into a second with no end in sight.…
Can shock treatment save the Liberal Party?
As 2019 gets underway, the Coalition finds itself in arguably its worst political position in recent memory. All the opinion…
The media won’t tell you, but it’s the middle-class rioting in France
One less-reported fact about the Paris ‘yellow vest’ riots is that they have sparked by small business traders, petit bourgeois,…
Bugger the bush – and our agricultural industries too
The enemies of the bush (resident in green-and-pleasant Brisbane) plan to close the Queensland pastoral colleges in droughty Longreach and…
Is our next Governor-General too safe, too male, too white?
In my book Winners Don’t Cheat, which is aimed at young Australians but accessible to all ages, I warn against identifying…
Just whose Palestine would Labor recognise?
How can some leading Australian politicians be so misguided and so wrong-headed as to call for the recognition of a…
The transsexual tsunami and freedom of speech
Back in 1964 Bob Dylan told us that “the times, they are a changin’.” I take it that even he…
