James Thomson

James Thomson

James Thomson is a British editor and travel writer who has been based in Slovakia for more than 10 years. He started working with The Slovak Spectator in 2008, when he wrote the 14th edition of the Spectacular Slovakia travel guide. He has also lived and worked in Austria, Australia, Britain and New Zealand. He teaches undergraduate courses on news and information, 20th-century European history and modern China.


List of author's articles

PM Robert Fico.
Video
People in countries that should know better are being treated like serfs, not citizens.
Local wags declared the offending pedestrian crossing a national cultural monument.
Foto
Think of it less as the ship of state, and more of a dodgem car.
Perinbaba.
You know it’s Christmas in Slovakia when everyone on TV is wearing hose and doublets.
Video
When politics and history collide, the result can be… well, confusing.
An older village house in Ďapalovce.
Foto
A rare earthquake reveals family solidarity and institutional weakness.
Smer leader Robert Fico received more than 530,000 preference votes in this year's election.
As the dust clears following the September 30 election, some startling facts emerge.
Billboards in Bratislava ahead of the September 2023 early election.
A month out from the election, little is clear.
The Nivy shopping mall in Bratislava.
To make urban cycling work, the attitudes of drivers, planners and politicians need to change.
Igor Matovič's controversial "€200 per child" policy appears as a delivered promise  on a billboard in June 2023 ahead of the September elections.
Perhaps they're just used to being short-changed.
Twitter headquarters is shown in San Francisco on November 4, 2022.
Some people still believe everything they read on the internet.
ChatGPT is developed by a company called OpenAI.
Or will high-tech plagiarism spell the end of humankind?
Illustrative stock photo
It is not unusual to find people brandishing combinations of three, four, five or even more titles.
Illustrative stock photo
Over the decades, this Slovak institution has proved both durable and obdurate.
People queue to pay their final respects to Queen Elizabeth II during the Lying-in-State at Westminster Hall in London on Friday, September 16, 2022.
Democracy has its limits.
President Zuzana Čaputová during a press conference on June 7, 2022.
Ukraine war derangement syndrome continues to ravage some in the intellectual classes.
Illustrative stock photo
The Slovak property market is like a swimming pool full of confused sharks.
What supervising an undergraduate thesis taught me about how the system works (or doesn’t).
Mariupol
Our neighbours continued to suffer while we enjoyed the Easter holiday. What has Slovakia learned?
A detained demonstrator shows a sign 'No War!' from a police bus in St. Petersburg on February 24, 2022.
The world’s largest country is in the grip of a cult.
People in Kyiv standing in front of a block of flats destroyed in an air strike.
Like it or not, Trump had a point about countries like Slovakia.
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