SOURCE: Johnson, Paul. “Shock Troops.” Spectator 274, no. 7909 (9 February 1980): 17-18.

In the following excerpt, Johnson assesses Podhoretz's political views and his personal insights about prominent politicians, intellectuals, and the social elite in Breaking Ranks.

New Yorkers, like Parisians, bring to the business of being an intellectual a dedication and seriousness which leaves us English flabbergasted. No Englishman and very few Englishwomen allow their intellectual (or political) views to invade their social lives. We may change our parties, even our beliefs, but never our friends. Our intellectual games are not played, as children say, ‘for keeps’. It is inconceivable that a book like Simone de Beauvoir's Les Mandarins (which celebrates, significantly, her affair with the American intellectual Nelson Algren) could have been written by an Englishwoman, let alone have become a best-seller here; and an English version of Lillian Hellman's outrageous re-writing of history, Scoundrel Time, which caused a sensation...