Sean Thomas is a bestselling author. He tweets from @thomasknox.
Yeah, I know, ridiculous. Cambodia? How can that be the best country in the entire world? For a start, most people can’t place it on a map. This includes close relatives of mine who are studying geography at A Level. They know all about the Marxist topography of urbanism, but Cambodia, err, um, is that
It’s difficult to remember a time before climate change – a time when our daily discourse, our newspaper front pages, endless movies and TV documentaries, and Al Gore, Greta Thunberg and Sir David Attenborough (Peace Be Upon Him), were not lecturing us, sternly and constantly, about the threat to our planet from the ‘climate emergency’,
When they come to write the history of the AI revolution, there’s a good chance that the writers will devote many chapters to the early 2020s. Indeed, such is the pace, scale and wildness of the development, it is possible entire books will be devoted to, say, what happened in the last week or so.
In 1988, I lived on the backpackery Khaosan Road, Bangkok, in a hotel which offered heroin on room service. It went like this: in the morning, you padded down the teakwood stairs to the little kitchen and you asked the pretty Thai girl for breakfast – scrambled eggs, bacon, ‘extras’. Ten minutes later the same
38 min listen
Welcome to a slightly new format for the Edition podcast! Each week we will be talking about the magazine – as per usual – but trying to give a little more insight into the process behind putting The Spectator to bed each week. On the podcast: TheSpectator’s assistant foreign editor Max Jeffery writes our cover story this week, asking
The haunted hotel. It’s a definite thing, isn’t it? From Stanley Kubrick’s classic The Shining to the slightly less classic I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, the hotel with an unwanted and probably long-dead guest is a leitmotif in scary cinema. It can also be found in poems, plays, novels; possibly the first
It’s one of the hoariest cliches in popular culture: that every fading generation must, in flailing anger at its own imminent irrelevance, turn on the next generation and say, ‘your music is dire’. From the crusty judge contemptuously asking ‘who are these Beatles’, to the middle-aged outrage surrounding the spitting and pogoing Sex Pistols, to
It’s sometimes difficult to remember a time before Facebook, isn’t it? It’s like trying to remember a time before the espresso martini (invented by mixologist Dick Bradsell in Soho in 1983) or a time when people smoked on planes (amazingly, that was allowed until the late 1990s), or that time, many ages past, so long
Argentine President Javier Milei’s recent speech, to the World Economic Forum in Davos, has caused a stir for several reasons. First, it was someone saying something interesting at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Also, it was someone being positive about capitalism and enterprise in a lucid, educated way. Agree with Milei or not, he
Even in the long-shadowed depths of winter, Sicily can be a seductive place. From the hushed, hidden and time-polished marble piazzas of intricately lovely Ortygia, to the White Lotus out-of-season treats of ‘so pretty it hurts’ (Ernest Hemingway) Taormina, this blessed island has for obvious reasons been attracting invaders and colonisers for thousands of years.
It’s one of the greatest puzzles of the universe, and one that has vexed humanity ever since we first gazed at the stars and thought of other worlds. Is our Earth the sole place that harbours life, or might it be found elsewhere, among the trillions of planets, star systems and galaxies? As Arthur C.
It’s hard to believe that only five years ago the word/acronym AI was barely seen outside the science pages, and even then solely in the most speculative way: as something that might happen, in a few decades, maybe, if you’re the dreamy type. But also maybe not. Now there literally isn’t a day that goes
If you had to choose a political word of the decade you could do worse than ‘woke’. Because these days ‘woke’ – and its various subsidiary forms: ‘wokeness’, ‘wokery’, ‘wokerati’, ‘the great awokening’, ‘woquemada’ – seems ubiquitous, and very much part of the verbal furniture. And yet woke has a surprisingly short history as a
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
