Sean Thomas is a bestselling author. He tweets from @thomasknox.
As a journalist, I’ve been on the periphery of quite a few wars: for example, I went to Bosnia as the war ended in 1995 (at a time when snipers were still a threat). I was in Egypt during its 2011 revolution, with its jubilant but scary air of lawlessness. And smouldering buildings in Cairo’s
I love American roadtrips. They are the ideal way to visit 96 per cent of the country, which is determinedly built (for good or ill) around the desires of the car driver. The brilliant roads, the endless motels, the hideous car lots that blight most of the cities (making parking a doddle, even if they
As famous capital cities of world-straddling superpowers go, Washington DC is somewhat disappointing. The grandiose urbanism is surely meant to resemble the boulevards of Paris, with the parks of London, but in reality the dreary post-modern/neo-classical bombast makes it looks like Tashkent married to Milton Keynes. A city that is planned to project power actually
The beautiful Siwa Oasis in the far western deserts of Egypt is a remarkable place, for multiple reasons. It’s probably been inhabited, continuously, for 12,000 years. Alexander the Great came here to consult the already renowned Oracle of Amun-Ra in 332BC (some say he is buried here, as he loved Siwa so much). You can swim in Roman cisterns fed
As a travel writer, I can get blasé about many aspects of travel: the free five-handed massage, the private plunge-pool out the back, those odd bits of overchilled orangey cheddar in an average Biz Class lounge. But one slightly childish thing that always pleases me is stamps in my passport. They should be emotionally meaningless:
It’s a cliché of publishing that men over the age of 40 only read military history. In my case it’s not entirely true: I still occasionally squeeze in the odd novel, some politics, even poetry if I’ve drunk too much sweet wine. But it’s true enough that my mind is probably over-furnished with historical-military examples, metaphors, and allusions. And for the last week I’ve been trying to
Recent births and deaths in my family have got me thinking about the family tree. A few years ago, we pieced together a remarkably discernible lineage that goes right back to William the Conqueror, or at least his alleged Anglo-Saxon concubine, and various Norman knights who used to own much of England. And it is
There are many things to be learnt from visiting an airport. A trip to Stansted Airport, for instance, will teach you that Stansted is a really dim place to locate an airport. Meanwhile, JFK in New York City will inform you that America is becoming seriously pricey for European tourists. But a recent trip to
Whenever Brexit is discussed these days, you will nearly always find a splenetic or exultant Remainer asking, often in a weirdly high pitched voicetone: where are the Brexit Benefits then? Can you name any? Mm? Just one? Where is the £350 million for the NHS? And to be fair to these people, since the Brexit vote, obvious, tangible, yay-look-at-this Brexit Benefits have
I have a friend, let’s call her Ellie, who has a diverting side hustle: she sells erotic images of herself online: nude, semi-nude, basically nude but in roller-skates and smoking Cohiba cigars. That kind of thing. She does this on a site many people will know: OnlyFans, which has become the site for women (and
They’re calling it ‘revenge travel’: the desire to make up for the touring opportunities we all lost when we were locked down in our pandemical homes. As a keen professional traveller, I confess I’ve got a fearsome case of this bug: I’ve spent the past 20 months going just about anywhere I can, playing catch
If the success of a new technology can be measured by the speed of uptake, there is no denying the epochal impact of ChatGPT. Within five days of its launch in late November, the artificial intelligence chatbot, which can provide clear, detailed answers to human questions, was being used by a million people. Now it’s
As a rule, ‘I told you so’ is an unattractive sentiment – simultaneously egotistic, narcissistic and triumphalist. Nonetheless, on this occasion: I told you so. Specifically, I told you so on 10 December last year, when I predicted in Spectator Life that 2023 might see humanity encounter its first non-human intellect, in the form of true
When I was a small boy, I had a favourite book: The Magic Faraway Tree, by Enid Blyton. Given that my own family life not was not untroubled, the story of how a bunch of regular kids travel, via this wonderful tree, to a sequence of fantastical places, where they meet lovable characters like the Saucepan
In the deliciously darkened corners of the Vesper cocktail bar, in the central quartier of the Siamese capital known as Silom, the patrons are guzzling some of the finest cocktails east of Suez: from the exquisite complexities of the ‘Silver Aviation’ (Roku gin, prosecco, maraschino, coffee-walnut bitters, almond and lavender cordial), all the way to
I’m a 30th generation Cornishman. I’m so Cornish my mum can make Cornish pasties blindfolded, my maternal grandmother was employed aged nine to break rocks in a Cornish tin mine (she was a ‘bal maiden’), and my second cousins founded Cornish Solidarity, which is the very-lightly-armed wing of Mebyon Kernow (the Cornish Plaid Cymru). Nonetheless
In the Red Square Rooftop Vodka Bar of the sleekly towering Novotel Hotel, on soi 4, Sukhumvit Road, Bangkok, it feels like the last three harrowing years never really happened. By day the sunny rooftop poolside is strewn with happy Europeans, Americans, Brazilians, Indians, consuming excellent wagyu burgers and freely flowing margaritas. As the sun
Unless you’ve been living under a snowdrift – with no mobile signal – for the past six months, you’ll have heard of the kerfuffle surrounding the new generations of artificial intelligence. Especially a voluble, dutiful, inexhaustible chatbot called ChatGPT, which has gone from zero users to several million in the two wild weeks since its
We’re finishing the year by republishing our ten most popular articles from 2022. Here’s number two: Sean Thomas’s piece from May on Karahan Tape. 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,
If there is one minor pitfall of being a travel writer, it is this. Whenever you tell a bunch of people what you do, invariably someone will ask: ‘Where’s the best place you’ve ever been?’ I struggled to answer until I got on a special new boat called the Greg Mortimer, operated by a Australian
