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…
Simon Collins
In the early 1980s I went out briefly with the daughter of a Thatcher cabinet minister, and spent several evenings…
Simon Collins
If there is anything which can be relied upon to bring a nation together better than the achievements of its…
Simon Collins
Queensland may have thrown in the towel in its wars with the cane toad, the rabbit and the crown-of-thorns starfish,…
Simon Collins
Two weeks ago on this page I complained about how rarely mainstream Australian media uses the word ‘masculinity’ without the…
Simon Collins
Underpinning Orwell’s most chilling dystopian vision was the belief that controlling what people say is half way to controlling what…
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…
Simon Collins
Last week a friend invited me to the final year art students’ show at the University of NSW. As I…
Simon Collins
In the England of my childhood, greengrocers were heavily reliant on South African farmers. This was still the case when…
Simon Collins
I don’t know if media coverage of the Geoffrey Rush defamation trial boosted Australian cinema attendances for last week’s simulcast…
Simon Collins
It wasn’t until the mid-1980’s that the party-pooping Ulema shut down Saudi Arabia’s cinemas. So there’s a good chance that…
