SOURCE: “Especially the Warts,” in Spectator, October 8, 1988, pp. 30–31.

In the following review of Intellectuals, Mount writes that, despite the “customary brilliance in handling and summarising” with which Johnson presents his assertions, the book is flawed by Johnson's limited definition of intellectuals and gratuitous personal attacks.

All too often, when coming to the end of a biography, one can only gasp to oneself (if internal gasping is a physical possibility): ‘What a horrible man.’ Set out over 400 pages or so—and biographies seem to be getting remorselessly longer again—there is something dispiriting about the lives of the heroes of our own and indeed of other times. So many of them were such cold and desolate monsters, emotional cripples belabouring with their crutches everyone within range, apparently incapable of genuine affection, or of a truly selfless act. Kindly readers blame the ‘debunking’ school of biography for distorting the truth...