SOURCE: “From Far Left to Far Right,” in New Leader, November 4–18, 1991, pp. 21–22.

In the following review of The Birth of the Modern, Draper appreciates Johnson's occasionally “fascinating” connective observations, but judges the book's overall tone to be “extreme” and “unfair.”

During the 1970s, Paul Johnson departed the immoderate Left of the British Labor Party for the immoderate Right of the British Conservative Party. He tells a revealing story about his constitutional tendency to excess in the Introduction to The Oxford Book of British Political Anecdotes (1986). From 1955 to 1970 Johnson worked at the Leftist New Statesman. One day, he was seated at a luncheon beside Aneuran Bevan, the radical British Labor Party politician. The host, a Socialist millionaire, gave each guest a Monte Cristo, then as today Cuba's most expensive cigar. Bevan “puffed his with profound enjoyment. Then he noticed mine was untouched and asked why. I had only just...