Sean Thomas

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,

If you must be colonized by the Spanish, make sure you have some of your own recipes beforehand

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

‘West is best’ has been axiomatic for centuries, so this is the cultural equivalent of the earth’s magnetic poles flipping around

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

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’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,

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

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

I love driving. When I say ‘driving’, I obviously don’t mean crawling along the North Circular at 2.7 miles per hour, in a state of zombified inertia, mutinously wondering why Keir Starmer’s voice is so weirdly soul-sapping. And when I say I love driving, I don’t want to claim I’m any kind of petrolhead. I

Tonight, the BBC will be broadcasting what is – to my mind – the scariest film ever made. Indeed, I would go further than that, I would say this movie is the scariest human artwork in any form – and that includes novels, plays, stories, the lot. This film beats them all, and by a