Modern Times never sold fast enough to hit a bestseller list, but word-of-mouth was fantastic. While he wasn’t the first to do this, he had the greatest impact as he made one tyrant after another accountable for their savage killings. Johnson dared to denounce them all as evil. Before that book, intellectuals commonly distinguished between bad “right-wing” totalitarianism (fascism and Nazism) and justifiable “left-wing” totalitarianism (socialism and Communism), whose crimes were overlooked. Johnson is most famous for Modern Times (1983), the breath-taking epic of twentieth-century tyranny. Johnson’s 28 books, including The History of Christianity (1976), The History of the Jews (1987), The Intellectuals (1988), and The Birth of the Modern (1991), have covered some of the biggest stories of all time. “Paul Johnson,” declared Wall Street Journal editor Robert Bartley, “is one of the premier wordsmiths of the English language.” The New Yorker called him “a good writer and clear thinker.” Even Foreign Affairs, pillar of the establishment, acknowledged his achievements: “A latter-day Mencken, Johnson is witty, gritty and compulsively readable.” He gives readers tremendous pleasure as he celebrates liberty and denounces tyranny. He tells a dramatic story with moral passion. An Exclusive Freeman Interview: Historian Paul Johnson on American Libertyįor friends of freedom, Paul Johnson is perhaps today’s most beloved historian.
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