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“... He was used to opponents like Williams, but might have been disconcerted by such friends as Paul Johnson, who believes he would now be a strong Thatcherite, John Wain, who invokes Orwell as an opponent of Arthur Scargill, or in America Norman Podhoretz, who feels sure he would be taking his stand with the ‘neo-conservatives against the ...”

“... discussion include Michael Bracewell, Dick Hebdige, Lynne Tillman, Kathy Acker, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Johnson, W.G. Sebald. The eateries and supermarkets of Aberdeen are visited, and rendered, as far as I can see, entirely accurately. (I come from Aberdeen, which is how I’d know.) Ditto the hills walked and the stone circles visited. Ditto the ...”

“... as if sensing the strain, was in both cases able to hound them out of office. (We have just seen Paul Channon, the Transport Minister, brazen out the constant run of transport disasters, thanks to solid backbench support. Would it have been the same if he’d been Jewish?) One Tory backbencher greeted Thatcher’s sacrifice of Brittan with the furious demand ...”

“... objected to the breadth of his canvas. Give us back the tidy Reformation we used to know about, Paul Johnson complained, something which began in 1517 and ended with the Council of Trent in 1563. This misses the point by several miles. Only by taking the story far into the 17th century can MacCulloch plot the line and plumb the depth of the greatest ...”

“... book – ‘a joyous interpretation’ – in the Daily Telegraph. In the Sunday Telegraph Paul Johnson asked the ‘why, oh why’ question: why another life of Lear? He seemed stumped for an answer. Levi says his book springs in part from an under-researched lecture on Lear he gave as Professor of Poetry at Oxford. Lear did not, as many ...”

“... masturbation’. This was in a letter of 1964 to the New Statesman, the people’s friend, where Paul Johnson had proclaimed that the Beatles were common, and a ‘menace’, and that, at their age, he himself had been into Beethoven and good books. He described his feelings at the sight of their wretched fans on television: ‘What a bottomless chasm ...”

“... think he was sacked from the Statesman but it’s true that he didn’t get on with the editor, Paul Johnson, and some months after his dinner with Pritchett he left. Either then or a few months later he was offered the editorship of the Listener. Not long afterwards I saw him at a Faber party; he mentioned the Listener and said that there might be a ...”

“... with the paper’s backers, and recent research seems to show him in no very creditable light. Paul Addison begins a commentary on Churchill’s career before 1914 by noting that it ‘depended in many respects on his relations with the urban working class’. His first constituency was Oldham. He was capable in those days, as Clarke reminds us, of ...”

“... with psychological implications which the author might well have pressed further. As it is, Paul Johnson, still hot (at any rate under the collar) from his editorship of the New Statesman, receives a comment so bland – ‘To Johnson and others, the prophecy of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom was rapidly coming to ...”

“... church felt itself to have been visited by the Holy Spirit, and to be making fresh use of what St Paul called ‘spiritual gifts’ or ‘the manifestation of the Spirit’: speaking in tongues, dancing in the spirit, ecstatic worship, healing, miracles, prophecies. This movement had its roots in American worship. It blew through many parts of the Church of ...”

“... ethos of the joint) about halfway through it. Here is where he had chummed up with Henry Fairlie, Paul Johnson, George Gale, Kingsley Amis and many of his other life-long boon companions, whose tales of debauch and dun and infidelity are the salt of the book. He had nice manners, and a generous style which he probably didn’t think of as democratic. He ...”

“... often very funny. There are hilarious set-pieces at the expense of, for example, John Braine and Paul Johnson. For the Sake of Argument is not an easy book to précis. There are eight parts and 72 essays, the allocation of which is somewhat random. Most of the pieces in ‘Rogues’ Gallery’, for instance, could go equally well into ‘Studies in ...”

“... has made. The answer is that while it has not greatly changed the outlines of the story as told by Paul Johnson, Hugh Thomas and a succession of memoirists, it begins to make possible a different type of account. It is only a beginning because the parallel French, Israeli, Egyptian and even, with very considerable exceptions, American papers are either ...”

“... passed into the hands of early collectors (Dominic Artaria, Ludwig Landsberg, Friedrich Grasnick, Paul Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Anton Schindler), before being scattered to the European winds, serious students are in possession of the bibliographical information they need. Our authors supply the fullest description of each book, going deep into matters of ...”

“... didn’t even bother with the sub-Freudian niceties of an Abse, preferring to sink straight to Paul Johnson’s level and to say that there is an axiomatic, Forsterian connection between homosexual and traitorous deportment. To clear Tom on this charge, then, is a matter of journalistic and political hygiene. But it still leaves the matter of misogyny ...”