Simon Collins

Simon Collins

20 June 2020 9:00 am

Like most Speccie readers I am anxious to give public vent to my outrage at police brutality, institutional racism and…

Simon Collins

6 June 2020 9:00 am

The uncompromising nature of Australia’s lockdown may well have been inspired by the example set by other countries. Or it…

Simon Collins

23 May 2020 9:00 am

Some people like to round off a meal with a glass of brandy and a cigar; others settle for coffee…

Simon Collins

8 May 2020 11:00 pm

People who shout and gesticulate while walking unaccompanied though city centres used to be called nutters. But we now have…

Simon Collins

24 April 2020 11:00 pm

After the cancellation of the Tokyo Olympics, the postponement of the 2020 Tour de France couldn’t have taken many people…

Simon Collins

11 April 2020 9:00 am

‘What did you do in the war, grandad?’ ‘I stayed in.’ If this really is a war, as we are…

Simon Collins

28 March 2020 9:00 am

I began my self-quarantine last week, after returning from London, but it wasn’t until five days later that the symptoms…

Simon Collins

14 March 2020 9:00 am

A friend recently invited me to a Sydney gallery opening to see paintings by a group of first nations artists…

Simon Collins

29 February 2020 9:00 am

Apparently many travellers now pay more attention to a hotel’s guest reviews than to its advertising. I tend to ignore…

Fear itself

15 February 2020 9:00 am

‘A very merry Christmas,’ sang John Lennon in 1971, ‘and a Happy New Year; let’s hope it’s a good one,…

Simon Collins

1 February 2020 9:00 am

If you stay single long enough most of your married friends will stop trying to match-make you and take up…

Simon Collins

18 January 2020 9:00 am

‘Dr Martin Luther King didn’t say “I have a nightmare,”’ is the opening line of a letter the IPA recently…

Simon Collins

21 December 2019 9:00 am

I’m starting to think the Victorians were right about children. And when I say Victorians, I’m not talking about that…

Simon Collins

30 November 2019 9:00 am

Like any right-thinking Australian, I was outraged to learn from a newspaper that our oldest bank has broken the law…

Simon Collins

16 November 2019 9:00 am

‘We are assessing the concerns raised and will investigate whether the program met our editorial standards,’ said the ABC’s managing…

Simon Collins

2 November 2019 9:00 am

With its manicured beachfront and sparkling, yacht-speckled view out across the water to the harbour heads, The Bathers Pavilion at…

Simon Collins

19 October 2019 9:00 am

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

5 October 2019 9:00 am

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

21 September 2019 9:00 am

Thanks to the refusal of Australian weather to stick to the IPCC script, Sydneysiders have just experienced one of the…

Queen's Land

7 September 2019 9:00 am

If last ditch Remainer attempts to block a no-deal Brexit fail, our head of state, already seen to have aided…

Simon Collins

24 August 2019 9:00 am

In a recent Speccie column my friend Giles Auty recalled his late father’s difficulties with door handles. This may have…

Simon Collins

10 August 2019 9:00 am

When I filed my first Spectator piece the Aussie edition was still a twinkle in the eye of the then…

Simon Collins

27 July 2019 9:00 am

Thanks to the increasingly infantile appetite of cinema audiences and the laziness of modern screenwriters, two distinct but related film…

Simon Collins

13 July 2019 9:00 am

‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,’ is the opening line of The Go-Between, L. P.…

Simon Collins

29 June 2019 9:00 am

You keep yourself nice, you shake the right hands. You spend decades cultivating the good opinion of punters of every…