Thomas W. Hodgkinson

How did this London townhouse become the world’s greatest research centre?

16 March 2024 4:30 pm

If you were asked to name the world’s greatest research centre in terms of discoveries per square yard, the answer…

Ghostly grandeur

12 August 2023 9:00 am

The history of the magnificent Thames-side palace, with its outrageous shenanigans spanning five centuries, is vividly brought to life by Gareth Russell

Searching for the best of all possible worlds – in London

15 July 2023 9:00 am

Niall Kishtainy examines the eccentric ideas of Gerrard Winstanley, Thomas Spence, John Adolphus Etzler, Thomas More and other utopians who lived in and around the capital

Can the ancient Greeks really offer us ‘life lessons’ today?

24 June 2023 9:00 am

Adam Nicolson thinks so. But his liveliest stories are about Pythagoras, who lived in a hole in the ground, and Thales, who fell into a well while studying the night sky

It’s thrilling to learn that the rebellious Urien actually existed

13 August 2022 9:00 am

Once, when we shared the same history teacher in our teens, my older brother Dominic handed in an essay about…

The Greek myths are always with us

19 March 2022 9:00 am

Once upon a time there was a collection of stories that everybody loved. They involved brave heroes such as Perseus…

Film's most unforgettable scene

12 March 2022 9:00 am

Fifty years since The Godfather’s release, Thomas W. Hodgkinson revisits the film’s most unforgettable scene

Has nostalgia become the Greeks’ national disease?

11 December 2021 9:00 am

Imagine a new take on the Greek myth of Pygmalion. A love-shy artist makes a woman out of marble who…

Paradise regained: how the world’s wastelands are regenerating

16 January 2021 9:00 am

Ignoring the padlocked gate, my six-year-old son Nicholas and I climbed through a break in the metal fence and pushed…

‘Instapoetry’ may be popular, but most of it is terrible

23 November 2019 9:00 am

Poetry is on a hot streak. Last year, sales in the UK topped £12 million for the first time —…

John Flaxman is the missing link between superhero movies and Homer

9 November 2019 9:00 am

As you enter the forecourt of the Royal Academy, you see them. A row of artistic titans, carved in stone,…

The best Terminator film since the first: Terminator Six reviewed

26 October 2019 9:00 am

The first Terminator film, which came out in 1984, was a high-concept sci-fi serial killer thriller. You can just imagine…

Gilgamesh, Michael Schmidt’s ‘life’ of a poem

12 October 2019 9:00 am

In the mid-19th century, around lunchtime, a pale young man with an enormous beard could be seen in the British…

Greece is the word for the New Yorker’s Comma Queen

1 June 2019 9:00 am

Mary Norris’s book about her love affair with Greece and the Greek language starts with a terrific chapter about alphabets.…

Going mad: A.K. Benjamin analyses himself

Playing mind games: Let Me Not Be Mad reviewed

2 March 2019 9:00 am

The journalist Auberon Waugh, in whose time-capsule of a flat I briefly lived in 2000, once summed up what he…

The most shocking sight in ancient Greece: men in trousers

12 May 2018 9:00 am

In his robust new biography of Alcibiades, David Stuttard describes how the mercurial Greek general shocked his contemporaries by adopting…

I’m in danger of becoming a flat-mind bore

31 March 2018 9:00 am

Reading The Mind is Flat is like watching The Truman Show and realising, while you’re watching it, that you are…

Demonised by history

23 September 2017 9:00 am

Some oleaginous interviewer once suggested to Winston Churchill that he was the greatest Briton who ever lived. The grand old…

The Emperor Constantine renames Byzantium

Christianity triumphant – and destructive

16 September 2017 9:00 am

In the late years of Empire, and early days of Christianity, there were monks who didn’t wash for fear of…

Tom Brown’s School Days, illustrated by Solomon van Abbe

Sink or swim

17 June 2017 9:00 am

I used to worry that I would never be a good writer because my childhood wasn’t interesting enough. I now…

Dark and graphic

10 December 2016 9:00 am

A woman birthing bloated speckled eggs from her supernaturally swollen womb. Sushi screaming and squirming. A skull-shaped sweet, bearing the…