Sean Thomas is a bestselling author. He tweets from @thomasknox.
As a travel writer, you soon learn that there are countries which, when you mention them, elicit a polite smile of incomprehension, which says: er, where’s that then? Laos is a classic example. Also Kyrgyzstan. And maybe Eswatini. But can it be true that there are chunks, regions, entire departments of France that conjure the
Remember the lockdowns? I wish I didn’t, but I do. Especially that insanely grim third lockdown, the winter one, which went on and on and on and which bottomed out, for me, as I did my one allotted weekly walk along the Richmond riverside, in freezing horizontal drizzle. I made sure I had a thermos
It was about a year ago when my dying father, diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, turned to me and said ‘Sean, can you get me some heroin?’. For a moment – understandably – I wondered if he needed this ultimate painkiller for some fairly ultimate pain, but he didn’t look like he was in agony.
There are many rituals surrounding the placement of a new Japanese Emperor on the Chrysanthemum Throne. Perhaps the most peculiar is the would-be emperor’s encounter with aquasi-sacred, 1300-year-old bronze mirror, the Yata no Kagami. This object, which embodies ‘wisdom’, is so enigmatic the aspirant emperor isn’t even allowed to see it; instead, functionaries are sent to assure the mirror of the new emperor’s fidelity. Some historians believe the mirror no longer exists, and was lost in a fire in Honshu’s Ise Shrine, 980 years
30 min listen
On the podcast: In her cover piece for the magazine, The Spectator’s assistant editor Cindy Yu – writing ahead of the COP28 summit this weekend – describes how China has cornered the renewables market. She joins the podcast alongside Akshat Rathi, senior climate reporter for Bloomberg and author of Climate Capitalism: Winning the Global Race to Zero Emissions, to investigate China’s
From my desk, as I write this, in a lofty room in a soaring new hotel in Phnom Penh, I can look down at the bustling streets and see the concrete, mosque-meets-spaceship dome of the Cambodian capital’s famous Central Market. Which also happens to be the place where, 20 years ago, I ate the single
I don’t know about you, but I love a bit of topical reading when I go abroad. That’s why, in my last week of travelling between lush, green, untouched Cambodian islands, I’ve been immersed in apposite books like Julia Lovell’s Maoism: a Global History, and Frank Dikotter’s The Cultural Revolution. So far, I’ve been pleased
21 min listen
This week, Svitlana Morenets says Ukraine’s counteroffensive is not living up to the hype (00:59), Sean Thomas says he likes travelling to crappy towns (10:27), and Angus Colwell defends London’s rickshaw drivers (17:38). Presented and produced by Max Jeffery.
As phrases go, ‘Twitter analytics’ is not the most exciting, especially now we are, apparently, meant to say ‘the social medium formerly known as Twitter analytics’. Nonetheless if you dig into Twitter’s user and viewer data, you can unearth some surprising, even mystifying anomalies. In this case, I’m talking about the Twitter account of the
There are plenty of reasons to visit Catania in Sicily, and some of them are positive. The town is impressively ancient – dating back to the 8th century bc. It boasts a handsome, lavishly voluted Baroque core. A few steps from that main piazza you can find the picturesque fish market, the Pescheria, which sequins the
Back in June 2020, I attended a quasi-legal Black Lives Matter protest in London, and a widely reviled counter protest, by hard-right Tommy Robinson-esque ‘football lads’, who were determined to ‘defend’ the Churchill statue and the Cenotaph. As a journalist, I was able to move freely between these two protests: one – the football lads – took place in Parliament Square and lower
I’m in a car embarking on a road trip through one of the great foodie regions of the world, charged with the onerous task of scoffing and boozing my way through five days of epicurean heaven. But where am I? Trundling along the Rhone valley from Lyon to Provence? Barrelling down the autostrada to Bologna?
He must be a busy man, Rishi Sunak. When he’s not rescuing the country from inflation, sending the Royal Navy towards troublezones, making long term decisions for a brighter future, herding worried Conservative MPs towards the lemming-edge of the next election, and organising globally important AI summits, I doubt he has much time to read the darker recesses
As we all know, the last few days have been filled with terrible news out of Israel and Gaza, and this news – on mainstream or social media – has been suffused with appalling pictures of cruelty, carnage and suffering. Like many, I have therefore been doing my utmost to ignore all of this, and
We’ve all been there, haven’t we? One minute you are sitting down, with a cup of tea, ready to listen to Sir Keir Starmer’s latest conference speech, the next you wake up, 17 hours later, the tea spilled across the floor, a line of dried spittle tracked on your chin, because Keir Starmer is so
I don’t know about you, but my reaction to learning about the felling of that tree in Northumberland was, well, weird. For a start, unlike many others, I’ve never hugged this lovely tree, never picnicked beneath it, never proposed next to it, never seen it after a long satisfying hike along Hadrian’s Wall, so I
I was writing a thriller in northeast Laos about 15 years ago near a town called Phonsavan, researching a mysterious megalithic site known as the Plain of Jars. When my research was done, I realised I had to devise a route home to the quaint Laotian capital of Vientiane. As I was driving one of
When it comes to British railway history, I can say, without exaggeration, that few places are more iconically located than my own home. This is because I live exactly where Camden Town meets Primrose Hill – and where Britain’s first intercity railway tore through inner London (around 1837), surging out of London’s first mainline station: Euston. Indeed, my own house is visible
There are certain things that are so shocking they can only be said by close friends. And as the British have been in a close friendship – an entente cordiale – with the French since 1904, I am here to say it to our neighbours across the Channel: I’m sorry, mes amis, but your food
34 min listen
On the podcast: In her cover piece for the magazine, The Spectator’s economics editor Kate Andrews writes that political short termism has broken Britain. She joins the podcast alongside Giles Wilkes, former number 10 advisor and senior fellow at the Institute for Government, to ask what went wrong? (01:12) Also this week: In his column Douglas Murray
