Mark Hodkinson

No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy

The first biography of the legendary British band to focus on their formative years. It highlights the desperately urgent days of pre-stardom, when the Queen quartet played with bands like The Reaction, The Opposition, 1984 and Sour Milk Sea.Author Mark Hodkinson has interviewed over 60 friends and colleagues of Freddie Mercury, Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon, and pieced together a fascinating web of stories that for the first time tell the true story of the emergent Queen.From the tiny downbeat village of Oadby in Leicestershire, where John Deacon grew up, to the exotic splendour of Zanzibar, where Farookh Bulsara was born, Hodkinson offers a new and enticing version of Queen. In tracing these unpublished stories he also examines the Queen era before and immediately after stardom.This is the first genuine account of Queen's rise to stardom, as told by those who knew the band and watched from the front row.

The Early Years

Queen

After a record 36 years stuck in the bottom division of the Football League, Rochdale AFC finally won promotion in 2009/10. This is a wry look at that season by a lifelong fan and acclaimed broadsheet journalist.

And Other Football Stories

Spotland: the Sun Also Rises

Rochdale FC are England's worst performing professional football club. They have spent the last 27 seasons in the basement division - a longer spell than any other club. Mark Hodkinson has supported Rochdale FC throughout this period. As a boy, he lived in the town, and the club has formed a touchstone of his life since he first saw them play on a cold, misty night in 1974. He has missed just a handful of home matches since then. At the start of the 2000/2001 season he was commissioned by The Times to write a weekly bulletin from Spotland. Over the course of the season, these articles provided a compelling insight into the fanaticism engendered for the country's lower league sides. As one of Britain's most respected sports writers, Hodkinson - through these humorous, informed, and passionate pieces - was able to turn his hand to the subject closest to his heart, Rochdale FC. He had undertaken similar commissions at Barnsley and Manchester City and these were also compiled as books, Life at the Top and Blue Moon, which are widely regarded as football classics. Blue Moon was Sportspages' best-selling book of 1999 and has already been reprinted several times. Life Sentence developed c

Life Sentence

As Tears Go by

Marianne Faithfull

'Believe in the Sign' is a 'sort of' memoir of a normal, average boy who would have grown up happily average and normal but for a dark and perverse passion: the seductive lure of masochistic devotion to a no-hope, near-derelict football club.

Believe in the Sign

'The Last Mad Surge of Youth' focuses on John Barrett whose band, Killings Stars, toured the world & enjoyed numerous hits while holding on to an integrity they forged through the revolution of punk & new wave. Inevitably, the hits dried up, his time ran out. He's now a washed up alcoholic.

The Last Mad Surge of Youth

Mark Hodkinson grew up among the terrace houses of Rochdale in a house with just one book. His dad kept it on top of a wardrobe with other items of great worth – wedding photographs and Mark’s National Cycling Proficiency certificate. If Mark wanted to read it, he was warned not to crease the pages or slam shut the covers. Today, Mark is an author, journalist and publisher. He still lives in Rochdale, but is now snugly ensconced (or is that buried?) in a ‘book cave’ surrounded by 3,500 titles – at the last count. No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy is his story of growing up a working-class lad during the 1970s and 1980s. It’s about schools (bad), music (good) and the people (some mad, a few sane), and pre-eminently and profoundly the books and authors (some bad, mostly good) that led the way, and shaped his life. It’s also about a family who just didn’t see the point of reading, and a troubled grandad who, in his own way, taught Mark the power of stories. In recounting his own life-long love affair with books, Mark also tells the story of how writing and reading has changed over the last five decades, starting with the wave of working-class writers in the 1950s and 60s, where he saw himself reflected in books for the first time.

Memoirs of a Working-Class Reader

This classic account of the birth of a legendary group is the truly authentic version of Queen's rise to stardom.Author Mark Hodkinson interviewed over 60 friends and colleagues of Freddie Mercury, Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon to piece together a fascinating jigsaw of anecdotes from the days when the future superstars were playing with bands like The Reaction, The Opposition, 1984 and Sour Milk.Intimate, suprising and meticulously researched, Queen: The Early Years is a riveting read accompanied by many previously unseen early photographs of the four band mambers.

Queen: The Early Years

The story of two men who almost single-handedly saved their football club from extinction. In the 80s David Kilpatrick and Graham Morris spied architects' plans to turn Spotland, the home of their beloved, beleaguered Rochdale AFC, into a housing estate. They set about saving the club but first had to take on the 'enemy within' - fellow directors.

How Two Unsung Heroes Thwarted a Secret Plan to Kill Off a Football Club

The Overcoat Men

Blue Moon traces a season in the life of Manchester City. Not just any season, but 1998-99, when the once-proud club, with two League Championships and four FA Cup wins to its name - not to mention a phenomenal fan base - was forced to battle the likes of Macclesfield Town, Colchester United and Wigan Athletic in English football's third flight. Mark Hodkinson was involved in every aspect of the club through a long, stirring season, one which culminated in the euphoria of promotion: mingling with players, ex-players, directors, office staff and fans, he was constantly on the look-out for the unusual, the offbeat, the hopeful and the heartbreaking. Through it all, he remained impartial, steadfastly resisting the temptation to become a mere pawn for the club's PR operation. Originally commissioned as a series of weekly articles for The Times newspaper, Hodkinson's column soon acquired cult status among fans. Now, in Blue Moon, the author has brought these articles together and, along with a considerable number of further anecdotes, both comical and moving, provides an unprecedented insight into the passionate community that is Manchester City FC.

Down Among the Dead Men with Manchester City

Blue Moon

That Summer Feeling

As Years Go By is a richly detailed portrait of Marianne Faithfull, the woman who has lived an incredible life, one that far transcends her best known role as courtesan to the chief rolling stone.

Mark Hodkinson

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