I can't seem to get enough Churchill biographies. And Paul Johnson's is among the best. Well researched, written and filled with anecdotes and pithy quotes. I especially liked Johnson's arguments as to whether Churchill "saved England" during WWII. Also the lesson's learned at the end of the b...
This history of the Jews is written through the ideas of a devout Christian who believes, i think wrongly, that Jesus intended to abandon Judaism in order to start a new religion . Yet, Johnson's own account of Jesus' ministry confirms that Jesus, a student and follower of Hillel, had as His miss...
A few years ago, I read the book Intellectuals by Paul Johnson. There really aren’t enough words to describe what that book did to my thinking about modern history. It was scandalous, salacious, shocking, sensational, and, most importantly, sentiment-shifting. The fact that people regularly put t...
It was also materialistic and increasingly wealthy. The great fact of geopolitics was Rome and its possessions, in the process of transforming itself from a republic into an empire. It now occupied the shores of the entire Mediterranean, from which one of its great men, Pompey, had driven all the...
He regarded the term Zealot as an honourable title, and he withdrew it when he deemed their activities to be terroristic or anti-social. The legitimacy of terrorism when other forms of protest fail was as hotly debated then as it is today, and the precise part played by Zealots and Sicarii, who w...
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Somewhat fuzzy photographs were published of what appeared to be his large round head bobbing in the water. Reports said he had swum nearly ten miles in just over sixty minutes and he was described as ‘radiant with vigour and in buoyant spirits’.1 This was merely one of the prodigies which appear...