SOURCE: “Fight, Fight, Fight,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, March 19, 1989, pp. 2, 12.

In the following review, Jacoby offers a negative assessment of Intellectuals.

Did you know that Rousseau enjoyed being spanked? Or that the poet Shelley was a “lifelong absconder and cheat”? That Karl Marx ate highly spiced food, rarely bathed and fathered an illegitimate child? The elderly Ibsen was a flirt, and feared heights and dogs? Brecht a womanizer, with dirty teeth, neck and ears? Or Sartre indulged in whiskey, jazz, girls and cabaret while his mother laundered his clothes? If you find this valuable, you're in luck: Paul Johnson has compiled this information in Intellectuals, an almanac of titillating facts and hearsay about writers and thinkers.

Johnson is an English journalist and historian of decidedly conservative bent; his histories have been vast, popular and often instructive studies peppered with scathing attacks on liberalism and leftism. Unfortunately...