Published by Hutchinson, part of Cornerstone Publishing
Format: Hardback
£20.00
Author:
Paul Johnson
Format: Hardback
EAN: 9780091936792
£20.00
Available for dispatch within 1-2 working days
EAN: 9780091936792
Published: 3 Jun 2010
'I now present for the reader two hundred or more sketches of people I have come across
during over sixty years as a writer, editor, historian, broadcaster and lecturer, all over the world. Some are mere glimpses, others attempts to pluck out the mystery. I have been obliged to exclude a number of interesting people who are still living, and I present my findings more for diversion and amusement than for edification. I simply raise the curtain on the human comedy I have witnessed, and present what I have seen, and heard, often in whispers and asides.'
In the course of a long and distinguished career, Paul Johnson has known popes, presidents, prime ministers, painters, poets, playwrights, even the foul-mouthed publican Muriel Belcher who ran the legendary Colony Club. Harking back to the scandalously anecdotal seventeenth-century book by John Aubrey on the celebrities of his times, Johnson's Brief Lives gives us a unique insight into recent history. But where Aubrey relied on hearsay (however meticulously ascribed), Paul Johnson draws more on personal experience.
He has advised Margaret Thatcher, counselled Princess Diana, had dinner with Lee Kuan Yew, and had a drawing done of him by Ernest Hemingway. He has been an insider and an outsider but, above all, is a shrewdly humorous analyst of a range of characters who have changed history, formed public taste or simply lightened our lives by their presence.
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It all makes compulsive reading. For Johnson has not only a retentive memory - total recall, in fact - and a lively imagination, but also a great raconteur's gift for witty dialogue, rivalling that of Oscar Wilde . . . Any historian of the last half of the 20th century - especially if he has if he has a taste for the comedie humaine - should read this book, if only to learn more about its author, the Thomas Carlyle of our age, who has played a life-enhancing part in history.
- New Statesman
Johnson's enthusiasm and industry are, as usual, prodigious
- Sunday Times
Paul Johnson was born in 1928 and educated at Stonyhurst and Magdalen College, Oxford. He was a Captain in the British army, Assistant Editor of the Paris magazine Realités, and Editor of the New Statesman, which he edited from 1964 to 1970. Paul Johnson has written over fifty books and contributed to newspapers and magazines worldwide, from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal to the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail. For many years he wrote a weekly essay in the Spectator, and he still writes a monthly article in Forbes. He has also made forty documentaries. Paul Johnson has four children and ten grandchildren and lives in London and Somerset. His hobbies are painting and hill-walking.
