Sean Thomas

Sean Thomas is a bestselling author. He tweets from @thomasknox.

Sunday

19 Jun 2022
Is there a British version of America’s attachment to guns?

Now that the horror of the Uvalde school shooting in Texas has begun to ebb away, as it always does, it is easy to think that things have returned to normal. And in America, they certainly have returned to normal. That is to say, the mass shootings continue, at the rate of about 11 a week, with a total of around 300 so far this year. As things stand, America is on course for its deadliest year of gun violence ever (equalling last year). Here are a few details of just some of these slayings. At the beginning of this June, an angry patient in Tulsa, Oklahoma shot dead his surgeon, Preston Phillips, then shot dead another doctor, plus a receptionist and a bystander – after he blamed one of the physicians for causing him pain from a recent surgery.

Is there a British version of America’s attachment to guns?

Tuesday

24 May 2022
How to have the archaeological adventure of a lifetime

Anyone with even a passing interest in history and archaeology has surely, at some point, asked themselves: what would it be like, to be an eye-witness to a world-shaking discovery? To walk down the Valley of the Kings, even as Howard Carter opened Tutankhamun’s Tomb. Or to visit Sutton Hoo in the week they unearthed the first glittering Anglo-Saxon treasures. Maybe you’d like to have been among the first to see marvellous walls of Troy as the great German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann lifted away the veil of thirty centuries. Well, remarkably, you can do something like this today, by visiting the so-called Tas Tepeler ('the stone hills') in eastern Turkey. More remarkably, as my recent article explains, you will witness something even more important, more exciting and mind-blowing than those examples given above.

How to have the archaeological adventure of a lifetime

Sunday

8 May 2022
Is an unknown, extraordinarily ancient civilisation buried under eastern Turkey?

I am staring at about a dozen, stiff, eight-foot high, orange-red penises, carved from living bedrock, and semi-enclosed in an open chamber. A strange carved head (of a man, a demon, a priest, a God?), also hewn from the living rock, gazes at the phallic totems – like a primitivist gargoyle. The expression of the stone head is doleful, to the point of grimacing, as if he, or she, or it, disapproves of all this: of everything being stripped naked under the heavens, and revealed to the world for the first time in 130 centuries. Yes, 130 centuries. Because these penises, this peculiar chamber, this entire perplexing place, known as Karahan Tepe (pronounced Kah-rah-hann Tepp-ay), which is now emerging from the dusty Plains of Harran, in eastern Turkey, is astoundingly ancient.

Is an unknown, extraordinarily ancient civilisation buried under eastern Turkey?

Thursday

21 Apr 2022
Can you tell which of these artworks was created by a computer?

Take a look at the four paintings on this page. If you are acquainted with modern art, you will probably assume, at a quick glance, that it shows four works by the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944). However, whatever your knowledge of modern art, I suggest you look again, because not all of these works are by that great pioneer of abstract painting. More than one of them is an original image created by a computer model, which was asked to do a digital artwork in the style of Kandinsky. Which are the fakes? I’ll give you the answer at the end of the article. Before we get there, you need to know how a computer can make such startlingly echoic images, and what it might mean for art. This story begins with ‘GPT1’ (the initialism means ‘Generative Pre-trained Transformer’).

Can you tell which of these artworks was created by a computer?

Sunday

3 Apr 2022
Rebuild our cities

For an ancient city with an illustrious industrial history, Derby doesn’t get much attention. But it does boast at least one famous, possibly apocryphal story, known to scholars of urbanism. Sometime in the 80s or 90s (accounts differ), a party of visiting German VIPs was given a tour of the city’s sights: the humdrum housing schemes; the corners of concrete bleakness; the sad disjointed malls and random multi-storey car parks. Struck near-dumb by the ugliness, the Germans apologised profusely for the damage clearly wrought on poor Derby by the Luftwaffe: wiping away a venerable city centre, leaving behind such tragic hideousness. At this point the local bigwigs laughed, perhaps awkwardly, and said 'Oh no, Derby was barely touched in the war, we did all this to ourselves, when we redeveloped.

Rebuild our cities

Tuesday

8 Mar 2022
James Dyson is right to urge us back to the office

I have almost no clue what office life is like. And I really mean ‘almost no clue’. Over several decades of professional work, my entire experience of office life consists of four hours working as a receptionist at a shipbroker’s in the City. I was so bad they sacked me by lunchtime: I didn’t even make it through the first day.  Chastened by this trauma, I thereafter vowed I would never do another hour of paid work in an ‘office’, and I have stuck to my principles. I have never been woken by a horrible alarm at 7am; instead, for all my life, I have heroically kept on sleeping until about 10.30. Likewise, I have never knowingly been caught in the ‘rush hour’; instead I sometimes stand at my window around 6pm and look at all the people hurrying for trains and then I remember it is time for a gin-and-tonic.

James Dyson is right to urge us back to the office

Saturday

26 Feb 2022

Thursday

24 Feb 2022
Why work from home when you can work from paradise?

 Colombo If I lift my eyes from my laptop, I can stare across my hotel’s rooftop infinity pool to the soft tropical blues of the Laccadive Sea. In a minute I might order another one of those excellent Sri Lankan crab curries. And another chilled Lion lager. Meanwhile the weather app on my phone tells me that London is shivering in a succession of bitter storms as the government ‘ends all Covid restrictions’, meaning everyone can go back to catching trains in the freezing fog. I make no apologies for sounding smug, Being a freelance writer (or self-employed/freelance anything) has many serious downsides — no sick pay, no holiday pay, no pension, no Christmas office party, plus the queasy horror of the January tax bill — but there are two things which have always combined, for me, to make it highly tolerable.

Why work from home when you can work from paradise?

Friday

7 Jan 2022
What the Capitol riots and the plot to stop Brexit have in common

It's not often that browsing the genteel aisles of Waterstones reminds you of madmen storming the Capitol in buffalo-horn helmets, but that's the buzz I got as I briskly scanned the History shelves. I happened on a slender volume called How To Stop Brexit, written by Nick Clegg. I’d never heard of the book (a realisation that probably attaches to quite a lot of books by Lib Dem leaders) so I pulled it out, with curiosity. The text, I thought, must be a new thing, written since we finally Brexited and Clegg joined Facebook. But no: it was published in 2017. It seems I was holding a kind of revolutionary pamphlet, advising Remainers how they might ignore Britain’s largest ever democratic vote, and get it reversed, thus evading the will of the people.

What the Capitol riots and the plot to stop Brexit have in common

Friday

27 Aug 2021
We need to find the muscle memory of western greatness

Like millions around the world, I have spent recent days watching – sometimes forcing myself to watch – these images coming out of Afghanistan, as the nation has fallen to the triumphant warriors of the Taliban with their untamed beards and M4 rifles.  They are the kind of images that come along once in a generation, but remain seared in the collective memory for decades. Many have compared these scenes of American defeat to the famous choppers-on-the-US-Embassy images of Saigon on 30 April 1975. And there are obvious, uncanny echoes. For me, however, the better comparison is with the fall of Phnom Penh (which happened just two weeks before the collapse of Saigon), when the rural Maoists of the Khmer Rouge marched into the Cambodian capital, ready to inflict their atavistic communism on a roiled and helpless country.

We need to find the muscle memory of western greatness

Thursday

12 Aug 2021
Who’d want to move to America now?

There’s a biopic released this summer, Roadrunner, about the late great chef, writer, bon viveur and TV presenter Anthony Bourdain. It recounts the many invaluable lessons Bourdain taught, such as: never eat the lower colon of a warthog; never order fish in a restaurant on Monday (it will probably be three days old); and, most of all, the American Dream is over. This last fact may seem jarring. Bourdain was a proudly patriotic American. However, I firmly believe he reveals this truth in the 36th episode of his splendid food-and-travel TV show, No Reservations. In this particular episode Bourdain visits Cleveland, Ohio. In his boyish, enthusiastic way, Bourdain tries all manner of nosh. And all goes well until he sits down in a fast-food chain called Skyline and ‘eats’ a popular local delicacy called ‘Cincinnati chilli’.

Who’d want to move to America now?

Thursday

11 Mar 2021
How I’d write Covid: The Thriller

Like 98.3 per cent of humanity, I’ve spent the past 12 months reading dubiously precise statistics, staring listlessly into space for hours on end, and, most poignantly, wondering if I am an extra in a movie about a pandemic. This last intuition only worsened when I watched Contagion — the 2011 Kate Winslet/Gwyneth Paltrow pandemic movie — and it felt like I was simply watching the TV news (again), right down to the scenes of giant stadiums ominously filled with empty hospital beds. The sensation that I am living through a real-life thriller is particularly acute for me, because that’s what I do: write thrillers. I used to write globe-spanning, Dan Brown-esque airport thrillers under the name Tom Knox; recently I have investigated my feminine side, and I now write grip-lit domestic noir thrillers — mainly about sensitive people trapped on drizzly islands — under the nom de plume S.

How I’d write Covid: The Thriller

Monday

10 Oct 2016
Why Brexit is just like having a baby

Since that moment in the early hours of June 24 when David Dimbleby said 'The answer is: we’re out', Brexit has been compared to many things. The Reformation. The Corn Laws. Weimar’s collapse into Nazism. Prohibition. The French, Russian and American Revolutions. But I think I’ve got a better comparison: first-time parenting. Scrolling through Twitter, reading about Brexit (as an anxious, just-about-Leave voter), I noticed my moods were rapidly cycling: from glee to gloom, from Bremorse to Brextasy, about every fifteen minutes. Indeed, there’s only been one other time in my life when I’ve been similarly prone to dramatic mood swings, and that’s when I was about to become a father for the first time. During those long months when my partner was expecting, I would often find myself switching from panic - it's the end of my life, I’ll never see a pub again! - to total rapture - my existence will have new purpose, I will be the best dad possible! And that feeling is just like my thoughts on Brexit.

Why Brexit is just like having a baby

Thursday

8 Sep 2016

Thursday

14 Apr 2016
Caught in the tourist trap

There are few more beautiful places in this world than Bhutan in the eastern Himalayas. I know this because, right now, I am staring down the sub-tropical Punakha valley, gazing at an untouched rural landscape where singing women hoe the sunlit chilli fields. It’s glorious. And gloriously devoid of tourists. Though apparently Prince William and Kate are coming here in the next couple of weeks. I hope they don’t lower the tone. This unusual absence of tourists is down to a government policy. Back in the 1980s (when perhaps two dozen outsiders made it into Bhutan every year) the authorities in the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon looked at the way tourism was blitzing its way across similar Asian beauties such as Nepal and Thailand, India and the Seychelles, and thought ‘not for us’.

Caught in the tourist trap

Thursday

11 Sep 2014
Countries shape character (so get ready to like Scots less)

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_11_Sept_2014_v4.mp3" title="Fraser Nelson, Tom Holland and Leah McLaren discuss how we can still save the Union" startat=50] Listen [/audioplayer]As I write this, I am sitting outside a weinhaus in Kaub, a half-timbered town on the wooded slopes of the middle Rhine. If you don’t know the place, I recommend a visit: the scenery is lovely, the hiking is fine, and the Riesling is great (they have to handpick the grapes, like peasants in a Brueghel painting, because the river-ine vineyards are too steep for machines). But there is another reason to make the agreeable journey to Kaub: it’s a brilliant place to contemplate the mysteries of nationalism and national character — i.

Countries shape character (so get ready to like Scots less)

Thursday

26 Jun 2014
Why Thailand’s elite fell out of love with democracy

Like any sensible, prosperous Englishman in his middle years, I spend every winter in Thailand. Indeed, I’ve been visiting the country for three decades: I can still remember my first hotel in Bangkok, a beautiful teak-stilted villa down a rat-infested alley which had the singular facility of offering heroin on room service. I went with the intention of staying a week or two. I ended up staying four months: the heroin on room service proved quite distracting. At the end of my stay I got a bill with just three things itemised: Room, Food, Powder. Now I’ve returned from maybe my fortieth visit to Thailand (I stopped doing the drugs years ago; I still enjoy the sun). And I’d like to say that this eternally sensuous, supremely beautiful, languidly hospitable country remains unchanged, despite all the troubles and coups, and despite the curfew which has, this week, finally been lifted.

Why Thailand’s elite fell out of love with democracy

Saturday

28 Jun 2003