Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

by Paul Johnson

Overview

"Johnson revels in all the wicked things these great thinkers have done...great fun to read."  — New York Times Book Review

A fascinating portrait of the minds that have shaped the modern world. In an intriguing series of case studies, Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Bertrand Russell, Brecht, Sartre, Edmund Wilson, Victor Gollancz, Lillian Hellman, Cyril Connolly, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Kenneth Tynan, and Noam Chomsky, among others, are revealed as intellectuals both brilliant and contradictory, magnetic and dangerous.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061253171
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	05/01/2007
Series:	P.S. Series
Edition description:	Revised Edition
Pages:	416
Sales rank:	104,893
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Paul Johnson is a historian whose work ranges over the millennia and the whole gamut of human activities. He regularly writes book reviews for several UK magazines and newspapers, such as the Literary Review and The Spectator, and he lectures around the world. He lives in London, England.

Editorial Reviews

"Johnson revels in all the wicked things these great thinkers have done...great fun to read." — New York Times Book Review

“Here’s a book that should have a cleansing influence on Western literature and culture for years to come.” — Malcolm Forbes, Forbes

“So full of life and energy and fascinating detail, and so right for the moment, that anyone who picks it up will have a hard time putting it down.” — Norman Podhoretz, New York Post

From the Publisher

"Johnson revels in all the wicked things these great thinkers have done...great fun to read."

New York Times Book Review

Here’s a book that should have a cleansing influence on Western literature and culture for years to come.

Malcolm Forbes

So full of life and energy and fascinating detail, and so right for the moment, that anyone who picks it up will have a hard time putting it down.

Norman Podhoretz

Mr. Johnson has given us case studies of 12 individuals, all of whom exhibit a variety of ugly traits; and from these studies, he goes on to conclude that intellectuals as a group are an untrustworthy lot. . . . The reader, in fact, suspects that most ''intellectuals'' in this volume were chosen on the arbitrary basis of having difficult personalities and a taste for radical ideas that Mr. Johnson, a former editor of The New Statesman turned conservative, apparently finds distasteful. . . . In the end, the reader can only conclude that Mr. Johnson has focused on the pecadillos of various intellectuals in lieu of the more difficult task of rigorously re-examining their ideas. It's an approach that undermines not their credibility, but his own. -- New York Times

Michiko Kakutani