Sean Thomas is a bestselling author. He tweets from @thomasknox.
Think how many times you’ve seen the ‘Mona Lisa’. You’ve seen her in movies, in books, in cartoons; you’ve seen her as icon of female beauty, as an emblem of feminine mystique, as a commentary on the male gaze, or an amusing face on which to paint a moustache. But in all that time I
There’s not much to do in Almaty, Kazakhstan. You can take a peek at the pretty wooden Orthodox cathedral, which is possibly the world’s third tallest wooden building, and erected without nails around 1904. You could visit the site of Leon Trotsky’s house, where he lived in internal Soviet exile from 1928 to 1929. However
I’ve been to a few underwhelming Unesco World Heritage Sites. Take the Struve Geodetic Arc, which curves almost invisibly across Eastern Europe. I visited without even realising. As for the Fray Bentos corned beef factory, in Uruguay, I’m writing this about 20 minutes from the Fray Bentos corned beef factory and I’m still reluctant to
In case you hadn’t noticed, the London Book Fair has been gracing our nation’s capital this week, down in Earl’s Court. There, the publishers, agents and buyers of the literary globe (London is second only to Frankfurt in ‘book fair importance’) have been feverishly buying and selling the rights to hot new titles, hot new
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This week: sectarian persecution returns Paul Wood, Colin Freeman and Father Benedict Kiely write in the magazine this week about the religious persecution that minorities are facing across the world from Syria to the Congo. In Syria, there have been reports of massacres with hundreds of civilians from the Alawite Muslim minority targeted, in part
It was when the peasant didn’t move for the second hour that I became suspicious. I was in an ultra-expensive hotel in southern Thailand. It was built to resemble a sequence of exquisite villas from some ancient Thai dynasty, arranged around tropical gardens and meadows. I was staying in my very own, beautiful, teak-and-mahogany mini-palace,
You can’t get a Pegu in Rangoon any more. That may not sound like a disaster for the ages – nothing, say, compared to the ongoing chancellorship of Rachel Reeves, MP for Blankstare-upon-Derr – but it is quite telling, once you know the background. To explain, the Pegu is a cocktail. Here’s the recipe, if
There are multiple reasons to be fascinated by DeepSeek, the Chinese AI chatbot that debuted last week, knocking Donald Trump off the headlines and $1 trillion off the US stock market. For a start, it represents yet another remarkable leap forward in the race to artificial general intelligence – which looks likely to arrive this
Like the definition of an old man in a hurry, since his inauguration Donald Trump has been pumping out orders and vetoes like Lieutenant Kilgore summoning napalm strikes in Apocalypse Now. Such has been the shock-and-awe of his legislative blitz, some of Trump’s less newsworthy diktats have gone nearly unnoticed. But hidden away in one White
The homes of famous writers are disappointing. Often, you see the famous desk, and that’s about it. There are exceptions: for example, Pushkin’s home in St Petersburg is interesting because they have the blooded waistcoat he wore during his fateful duel. Hemingway’s house in Cuba is intriguing because it is so macho – pistol, rifles,
It gets somewhat forgotten, Osaka. On the bamboo-and-tatami trail of Japanese sites, this ancient port, fort and conurbation at the very heart of Japan commonly misses out on foreign visitors: as everyone rushes from Tokyo to Kyoto, from sacred Mount Fuji to ancient Nara to haunted Hiroshima. For most overseas tourists, Osaka is just a
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Alexandra Shulman reads her fashion notebook (1:13); Sean Thomas asks if a demilitarised zone in Ukraine is inevitable (6:02); Matthew Parris argues against proportional representation (13:47); Adrian Dannatt explains his new exhibition Fresh Window: the art of display and display of art (21:46); and Philip Hensher declares he has met the man
A famously elitist members’ club, a 900-year-old meat market, and a traditional old barbershop may not feel like they have much in common. In fact, they didn’t – not until the last week or two, when they all simultaneously closed in their disparate parts of London. The first closure, that of the Groucho Club, has
It is the strangest place, the demilitarised zone (DMZ) that separates South Korea from North Korea. It is simultaneously a historic battlefield, a sombre graveyard, a tourist honeypot full of coach parties from Seoul, and a Cold War frontier, hotly defended on either side. One minute you are looking at a kiddies’ funfair, or a
It’s an interesting and unusual word, agentic. For a start, some language enthusiasts dislike it as a mulish crossbreed of Latin and Greek. Also, its etymology is obscure. It appears to derive from 20th-century psychology: one of its first usages can be found in a study of the infamous 1960s Milgram experiments at Yale University,
I still remember the first time I saw Vang Vieng, in Laos. It was many years ago, before the Chinese began pouring money in (such is the scale of Chinese investment, Laos now has high-speed rail). I was driving one of the very few rentable 4x4s in the country, picked up in the sleepy capital
Ise, Japan They say of Japan that if you come here for a week, you want to write a novel about Japan. After a year, maybe a few essays. After a decade, a page. It is one of those countries which seems to get simultaneously more fascinating and opaque. Possessing an ancient monarchy is like
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Paul Wood analyses what a Trump victory could mean for the Middle East (1:16); Sean Thomas gets a glimpse of a childless future while travelling in South Korea (8:39); in search of herself, Imogen Yates takes part in ‘ecstatic dance’ (15:11); a second selection of our books of the year
If you are looking for a pointer for the future of the world, the free-diving fisherwomen on the matriarchal, shamanistic South Korean island of Jeju are not an obvious example of where we’re heading. Because the haenyeo are famously unique. And famously hardy. But what is happening to them should concern us all. In simple
Such an awful lot of stuff is happening right now, even the keenest observer of social trends could be forgiven for missing a statistical milestone passed earlier this month. So here it is: at the beginning of October, it was revealed that, for the first time since the 1970s baby bust, deaths outnumbered births in
