SOURCE: “Making Churchill Cry,” in Times Literary Supplement, December 27, 1996, p. 36.

In the following review, Keates offers an unfavorable assessment of To Hell with Picasso.

In Wycherley's The Country Wife, it is the foolish beau Sparkish who says of his wily mistress Alithea, “she'd have me believe the moon had been made of a Christmas pie.” In the case of Paul Johnson, one unique to the point of bizarrerie, the reader has always played Sparkish to his Alithea, but with a slight yet significant difference. Johnson is not only concerned that others should have faith in such astro-culinary transubstantiation. The important secondary feature is our acknowledgement that he himself believes in the miracle. As he is a Catholic of the most bigoted variety, this has never been a problem. The moral dangers inherent in conviction as an end in itself clearly do not trouble him. If he cherishes any...