Paul Johnson
Receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom marked a significant moment in Paul Johnson's career, one that brought international recognition to a British writer who had spent his working life moving between journalism, history, and commentary.
Johnson was born on 2 November 1928 in Manchester and received his education at Stonyhurst College and then at Magdalen College, Oxford. He held United Kingdom citizenship and worked in English across a range of roles — writer, journalist, opinion journalist, editor, historian, author, and speechwriter. Alongside the Presidential Medal of Freedom, he received the Francis Boyer Award and was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
Johnson died on 12 January 2023 in London at the age of 94. Among the honours he accumulated over his career, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and his appointment as Commander of the Order of the British Empire together reflect recognition he received on both sides of the Atlantic.
Quotes by Paul Johnson
One modern academic lists Rousseau’s shortcomings as follows: he was a ‘masochist, exhibitionist, neurasthenic, hypochondriac, onanist, latent homosexual afflicted by the typical urge for repeated displacements, incapable of normal or parental affection, incipient paranoiac, narcissistic introvert rendered unsocial by his illness, filled with guilt feelings, pathologically timid, a kleptomaniac, infantilist, irritable and miserly’.
The Holocaust was planned; and Hitler planned it. That is the only conclusion which makes sense of the whole horrifying process.
Mr. Churchill, sir, to what do you attribute your success in life?” Without pause or hesitation, he replied: “Conservation of energy. Never stand up when you can sit down, and never sit down when you can lie down.” He.
Not interested in food or drink, he ate his meals, if he had any choice in the matter, in ten minutes and never caroused. No one ever saw him drunk.
The fact is, the Mosaic code was far more humane than any other, because, being God-centred, it was automatically man-centred also.
This book is dedicated to the people of America – strong, outspoken, intense in their convictions, sometimes wrong-headed but always generous and brave, with a passion for justice no nation has ever matched.
It is one of the many ironies of this period that, at a time when the intelligentsia were excoriating Mellon for tax-evasion, and contrasting the smooth-running Soviet planned economy with the breakdown in America, he was secretly exploiting the frantic necessities of the Soviet leaders to form the basis of one of America’s most splendid public collections.
Confusion has always surrounded Rousseau’s political ideas because he was in many respects an inconsistent and contradictory.
