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"[I]t is about time we destroyed the British class system"
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Paul JohnsonI have just finished what is, without doubt, the nastiest book I have — Paul Johnson
"I have just finished what is, without doubt, the nastiest book I have ever read. It is a new novel entitled Dr. No and the author is Mr Ian Fleming. ... By the time I was a third of the way through, I had to suppress a strong impulse to throw the thing away, and only continued reading because I realised that here was a social phenomenon of some importance. There are three basic ingredients in Dr No, all unhealthy, all thoroughly English: the sadism of a schoolboy bully, the mechanical, two-dimensional sex-longings of a frustrated adolescent, and the crude, snob-cravings of a suburban adult. Mr Fleming has no literary skill, the construction of the book is chaotic, and entire incidents and situations are inserted, and then forgotten in a haphazard manner. But the three ingredients are manufactured and blended with deliberate, professional precision ... Our curious post-war society, with its obsessive interest in debutantes, its cult of U and non-U, its working-class graduates educated into snobbery by the welfare state, is a soft market for Mr Flemings poison. ..."
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Paul Johnson
Paul Johnson
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"A Stalin functionary admitted, "Innocent people were arrested: naturally - otherwise no one would be frightened. If people, he said, were arrested only for specific misdemeanours, all the others would feel safe and so become ripe for treason."
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Paul JohnsonQuote
"It was part of Rousseaus vanity that he believed himself incapable of base emotions. I feel too superior to hate. I love myself too much to hate anybody. Never have I known the hateful passions, never did jealousy, wickedness, vengeance enter my heart … anger occasionally but I am never crafty and never bear a grudge. In fact he frequently bore grudges and was crafty in pursuing them."
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Paul JohnsonQuote
"Men are excessively ruthless and cruel not as a rule out of malice but from outraged righteousness. How much more is this true of legally constituted states, invested with all this seeming moral authority of parliaments and congresses and courts of justice! The destructive capacity of an individual, however vicious, is small; of the state, however well-intentioned, almost limitless. Expand the state and the destructive capacity necessarily expands too. Collective righteousness is far more ungovernable than any individual pursuit of revenge. That was a point well understood by Woodrow Wilson, who warned: Once lead this people into war and theyll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance."
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Paul JohnsonQuote
"The article by Roald Dahl in the August Issue of Literary Review is, in my view, the most disgraceful item to appear in a respectable British publication for a very, long time. Indeed 1 cannot recall anything like it ... As a rule, in a civilised country like Britain, those who hate the Israelis, or the Jews in general, are careful to mask their views behind a screen of anti-Zionism, thus in theory giving their collective condemnation a political rather than a racial rationale. Dahl is a different case. He is too reckless, or too angry, or too confident in getting away with it, to take such precautions."
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Paul JohnsonQuote
"Intellectuals is a caricature of the bad faith it itself denounces. Were we to judge it by Johnsons own standards, the result would be clear. We would not give a fig for Mr Johnsons private life. He might be an excellent husband, an admirable father, a good colleague, and even in his other work a decent historian. None of this would redeem the shallowness of his arguments."
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Paul Johnson