Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Nov 1, 2024 | thetimes.com | Thomas W. Hodgkinson

A few days before we meet, a friend of Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s plunges to his death from a tenth-floor apartment in Moscow. It’s the latest in a series of untimely ends that, over the past two decades, have befallen prominent Russians, some of whom have opposed Vladimir Putin. The autocratic president’s No 1 enemy, it has been said, is Khodorkovsky himself, once Russia’s richest man, who later came into spectacular conflict with Putin and then spent a decade in prison.

Sep 24, 2024 | theoldie.co.uk | Thomas W. Hodgkinson

She was ‘so beautiful, in mind and heart, in person and spirit; and whether with a crown upon her head or without it and nameless, a grace to the human race’. That was the author Mark Twain writing about the Empress Elisabeth of Austria and Queen of Hungary, who died 125 years ago this September, aged 60, murdered by an unhinged anarchist on the shores of Lake Geneva. In this anniversary year, the Empress, also known as Sisi, is back in fashion.

Aug 14, 2024 | dailymail.co.uk | Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Once upon a time, before anyone had heard of dinosaurs, locals in Dorset used to stumble on strange-shaped stones on the beach – and sell them as curios. The curved sea-creatures we know as ammonites they called ‘sea snakes’. As for belemnite molluscs, they named them, rather colourfully, ‘devil’s fingers’. Later, it was realised they dated back millions of years – and many of these ‘curios’ are now displayed in the Natural History Museum.

Jul 12, 2024 | dailymail.co.uk | Thomas W. Hodgkinson

To be or not to be a pushy parent. That is the question, or one of them at least, that faces anyone who embarks on the epic project of having children - and, when it comes to Shakespeare, I am nothing if not pushy. My son Nicholas, who is ten, had iambic pentameters thrust upon him from birth. I recall crooning: ‘O mistress mine, where are you roaming?’ from Twelfth Night over his cot. It helped to get him off to sleep. To my delight, Nicholas is a fan of Macbeth (the graphic novel version).

Jul 10, 2024 | ragazzo.substack.com | Theo Zenou |Thomas W. Hodgkinson |Denis Noble |Lauren Young

Welcome to LINKS — my attempt to provide Rhapsody readers with five interesting stories that tell us something about what it means to be human . LINKS is published every Wednesday. Have a link you want to share? Drop it in the comments. By Theo Zenou & Thomas W. Hodgkinson, Nautilus“To understand why, we talk to Albert Read, author of The Imagination Muscle. He argues that imagination is intertwined with acts of creation, of which writing is an example.