Remembering Paul Johnson (1928-2023)

Remembering Paul Johnson

• Paul Johnson, Prolific Historian Prized by Conservatives, Dies at 94 New York Times 01/12/23.
• Paul Johnson, prolific journalist and historian who started on the Left but became a champion of the Right – obituary The Telegraph 01/12/23.
• Paul Johnson, friend of Israel and the Jews, dies at 94 The Jewish Chronicle 01/15/23.
• On the Writer Paul Johnson (1928–2023 National Review:

  William F. Buckley Jr. wrote that Johnson was liable to be underrated, or taken for granted, because he was so routinely excellent. “His performances are unvaryingly (boringly?) extraordinary,” he wrote. WFB went on to say that Johnson had had “as productive a literary-analytical career as any in modern times.” And he said that in 1994, when Johnson had about 20 more writing years in him.

• Remembering Paul Johnson, the Historian of Human Dignity, by Hans Zeiger. Public Discourse 01/23/23. Underlying Paul Johnson’s historical writing was the sense that people possess an innate dignity. To Johnson, history was the story of people—flawed, creative, reasoning, exceptional—with the capacity for incredible achievement. People, he thought, were made with a purpose, and that meant history has a purpose.
• Knowledge and Verve: Remembering Paul Johnson, by Theodore Dalrymple. City Journal 1/13/23:
  Johnson liked nothing more than to infuriate by means of iconoclastic polemic. His book Intellectuals (1988) provided potted biographies of such revered figures as Rousseau, Marx, and Tolstoy, demonstrating what rotters they all were in their personal lives. This was not exactly an exercise in scientific method, but it was good fun and gave pleasure to those who distrust intellectual gurus. It also gave rise to insinuations that Johnson himself did not always quite live up to the moral ideals that he so fiercely propounded in public.

  He coined striking phrases—Hitler’s views, for example, were “the syphilis of antisemitism in its tertiary phase”—and he could never be accused of mealy-mouthedness. His views, though somewhat changeable, were expressed with vigor approaching dogmatism, though they were always well-informed. You knew where you stood with him.

  It is customary to say of remarkable men that we shall not see their like again. Whatever may be the case with other remarkable men, this is likely to be true of Paul Johnson. It is unlikely that anyone will tackle so huge a range of subjects again with such knowledge and verve.

• The World of Paul Johnson Book and Film Globe 06/01/23. "The late historian didn’t have a lot of friends on the left, but his popular histories help explain the present day."
• Paul Johnson: A Great Man of Letters The Catholic Herald 01/01/23:

  ... He had his undeniable faults, of which irascibility was just one, but he was also exemplary in his hard work (few people could write so quickly and eloquently), his diligence (the reading undertaken for his work and his range of reference was remarkable); his loyalty to his friends and his devotion to his children and grandchildren. His son Daniel is a prominent Catholic journalist (and writes in this edition). He was a Defender of the Faith; there are few of his calibre now.

  At his funeral, the opening hymn was, unexpectedly, “To Be a Pilgrim”, the words for which are based on John Bunyan, the anti-Catholic Puritan. It might seem a curious choice until we consider the words: “Hobgoblin nor foul fiend can daunt his spirit/ He knows he at the end shall life inherit”. That summed Paul Johnson up: may it be so for him.

• Paul Johnson and the fate of conservatism, by Dominic Green. 06/19/23:

  ... Johnson did as much as any writer to spread the ideal Western civilization, and especially Judeo-Christian civilization, in the U.S. These ideas have little purchase in Britain. Johnson’s son Daniel is one of their few advocates, and he, too, finds more receptive audiences abroad. Like Roger Scruton, Paul Johnson found that Americans supposedly a frivolous and unthinking people, are more interested in ideas than the British are. It is telling that Johnson received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush in 2006, but he was not appointed a Companion of the British Empire until 2013.