Prolific Paul
It’s the birthday of the journalist Paul Johnson, born in Barton, Lancashire, in northwestern England (1928). One of the most well known right-wing commentators in England, he started out as a liberal. He worked for years as a journalist for the left-wing New Statesman magazine in London, and he was a chairman of his local chapter of the left-wing Labor Party, when he suddenly made a dramatic political swing to the Right, supporting the Conservative Party and Margaret Thatcher in 1979. He said at the time, “I once thought liberty was divisible–that you could have very great personal liberty within the framework of substantial state control of the economy….And I don’t mind admitting I was quite wrong.”
…He writes about 6,000 words a day, every day…
He wrote about his change of heart in his book The Recovery of Freedom (1980). He has since gone on to argue that most of the worst political movements of the 20th Century came from the Left, including the regimes of Stalin, Lenin, and Pol Pot. He has criticized everything from feminism and third-world independence movements, to the evils of pop music. He once said, “Pop music is the most evil instrument ever aimed at the heart and soul of youth.” More than anything else, he has criticized intellectuals.
Johnson is also one of the most prolific historians of our time. He writes about 6,000 words a day, every day. But he says, “That’s nothing to a chap like Sartre! Sartre could do 20,000 words a day! That’s why in my essay on him I call him a little ball of fur and ink!” His books include A History of Christianity (1976), A History of the Modern World (1983), A History of the Jews (1987), and A History of the American People (1997).
From the Writer’s Almanac by Garrison Keillor
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