SOURCE: “Intellectuals All?,” in Modern Age, Vol. 33, No. 3, Fall, 1990, pp. 298–99.

In the following review, Felix offers an unfavorable assessment of Intellectuals.

Paul Johnson has written four wide-ranging, popular histories characterized by an intelligence cleansed of stereotypical conceptions and an ease in synthesizing vast varieties of experience. His Modern Times (1983) informed the reader about significant elements of recent history which the predominantly left-wing perspective of Western academia has distorted or passed by, for example, Herbert Hoover's anticipations of the New Deal or the extent of the damage caused by China's Cultural Revolution. His new book is not in this class. Indeed one hesitates to assign it to a class.

If Johnson's idiosyncratic views brightened a mass of data in the earlier works, those views take total command here regardless of the data. In his decade and a half with the left-wing New Statesman, six years of it as editor...