Lawrence Osborne | The Spectator columnists & writers

The strange inspiration of the Gobi desert

The first time I went to Mongolia was in 2014, when I travelled across the country with the actress Michelle Rodriguez and a group of her friends, courtesy of the Mongolian-American conservationist Jalsa Urubshurow. Driving out of Ulaanbaatar at dawn, we stopped at a market on the outskirts of the city to buy caviar, blinis and crates of Chinggis vodka for the 12-hour drive. Because I was not a follower of the Fast & Furious franchise, I had little idea who Michelle was, but every vendor in that tiny market knew her on sight. The place came to a standstill at 5 a.m. It was clear that the terrifyingly long reach of Hollywood extends even to the Gobi desert, where presumably pirated copies of the Fast & Furious movies light up a thousand gers on winter nights.

The argument that found its way into The Forgiven

I moved to Bangkok ten years ago in order to be in a place where nothing happens, where no one knew me and where nothing cost very much. A decade on, after a military coup, running street battles between protestors and soldiers, a ceaseless social life and costs reaching about the same levels as Brooklyn, I have retained at least one of my original reasons for leaving New York: radio silence relative to events in my far-off ‘career’ on the other side of the world. This month my novel about Hong Kong, On Java Road, came out, and so did the film version of an earlier novel, The Forgiven. The principal response outside of reviews has been three death threats postmarked China. It is monsoon here, the rains coming in at 5 p.

It’s getting harder to laugh off the idea of UFOs

When the late-night talk-show host James Corden asked Barack Obama about UFOs last month, there was as usual an air of nervous joviality surrounding the subject. Bandleader Reggie Watts pressed him as well and Obama, as if relenting, admitted two things. Firstly, that he could not divulge all that he knew on air; and secondly, that the slew of footage released by the Pentagon in the past two years showing UAP — ‘unidentified aerial phenomena’ — is in fact real. As if overnight, the fringe conspiracy air that has hung over the topic of UFOs for 70 years has seemed to vanish, and this month the Director of National Intelligence is delivering a report to Congress on the troubling phenomena alluded to by Obama — there are objects appearing in our air space for which we have no explanation.

How Korean cinema mastered the art of horror

There is a moment in the Jung brothers’ 2007 ghost film, Epitaph, when a young doctor in wartime Korea realises that the wife he adores does not have a shadow. He is entertaining her with a shadow puppet show in their home when he notices the aberration. ‘Walk to me,’ he says as he waves a naked light bulb in front of her. She had been a visiting medical student in Japan a year earlier and, unbeknownst to him, had died in an accident. It’s a moment that perfectly illustrates the psychological subtlety and brilliant scene-making of Korean film. Epitaph is about a group of young doctors working in a hospital under the Japanese occupation. Linking different stories and the appearance of gwisin — wandering and vengeful ghosts — the gorgeous imagery and narrative complexity marked a turning point in the outside world’s perception of K-Horror, a genre which had hitherto produced its fair share of schlock.

Violence has long flowed under Bangkok’s surface

Three years ago I sat down to write a novel set in my adopted home city. Placing its claustrophobic action in the near future, I had no trouble imagining my mostly foreign characters haplessly trapped inside a decaying high-rise apartment complex and surrounded by political upheaval. Thailand has endured more military coups since 1945 than any nation on Earth, and I myself have lived through two, in 2006 and 2014, while the violent uprising of 2010 occurred while I was far away in New York. They are peculiar coups by world standards. Two Turkish friends who visited in 2014 were disgusted by the lack of tear gas and fatalities inflicted by air power. ‘You call this a coup?’ they asked. True, there was a lot of bad dancing in the streets, and because the protestors were pro-establishment the police were nowhere to be seen.

Shirtmaker Simone Abbarchi

The Premio Rezzori literary prize — held every May in Florence — is named after the Austrian writer Gregor von Rezzori, who lived for years in the small village of Donnini, east of the city, with his aristocratic wife, Beatrice Monte della Corte. Von Rezzori died some years ago but his formidable wife, now 92, is the doyenne of Florentine literary life and in the first week of May I was summoned by her from distant Bangkok, where I live, in order to be one of five finalists deposited in the Hotel Porta Rossa and groomed on how to behave at an awards ceremony to be held three days later in the Palazzo Vecchio. The other four of our merry band were George Saunders, David Szalay, Katie Kitamura and Andreï Makine. Margaret Atwood and her husband were there as well.

Peaceful yet violent: the Thai paradox that still baffles the West

The scene of the recent bombing at the Erawan shrine has swiftly been remodelled to make it seem as though nothing happened. Upbeat slogans - 'Stronger Together' – and a forensically dubious ‘clean-up’ have gone hand in hand with a media campaign to reassure millions of tourists that they are safe in the Land of Smiles. The Chinese, however, have cancelled many of their vacations and the investigation rumbles on inconclusively, as is often the way with Thai investigations, which usually peter out in a vague inconclusiveness. An image is starting to form of Thailand as a uniquely dangerous tourist destination, riven by political violence and unprovoked attacks on hapless tourists. The film industry often tells a similar story: ‘No Escape’, which stars Owen Wilson, and is released next week, capitalises on this same emotion.

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