Paul Johnson

Paul Bede Johnson (Manchester, 1928 – London, 2023) was a British journalist, popular historian, speechwriter and author. He began his career on the political left and later became a well-known conservative historian, reaching a wide readership with books that ranged across centuries and continents.

He was educated at Stonyhurst, a Jesuit school, and then at Oxford, where he studied history under A. J. P. Taylor. His national service took him to Gibraltar, where he later said he had seen the grim cruelty of the Franco regime at first hand. He then worked in Paris for the magazine Réalités and became Paris correspondent and later editor of the left-leaning New Statesman, a post he held from 1965 to 1970 amid some resistance to a Catholic taking it.

During the late 1970s his views shifted, and he began criticising trade unions and the wider left. From 1981 he wrote a long-running column for The Spectator and contributed to American outlets such as National Review and Forbes. He also wrote speeches for Margaret Thatcher. His output was large and varied: histories of the Jews and of Christianity, studies of intellectuals such as Marx, Rousseau and Sartre, and a novel, Merrie England. He wrote with a narrative drive meant for general readers, and his anticommunism, scepticism about the European Union and defences of controversial figures such as Nixon and Pinochet made him admired by some and criticised by others.

His legacy lies mainly in popular history and in the debate about religion and culture in public life. In 2006 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour in the United States, a sign of the reception his work found across the Atlantic.