SOURCE: “The Wealth of Notions,” in National Review, June 24, 1991, pp. 42–43.

In the following review of The Birth of the Modern, Sobran praises Johnson's wide-ranging knowledge but finds shortcomings in the book's lack of humor and drama, and in Johnson's “superficial” understanding of modernity.

Paul Johnson is spreading himself thick. He has already written two surveys of modern intellectual life; histories of Christianity, the Jews, the English people, and Ireland; biographies of Elizabeth I and Pope John XXIII; and of course Modern Times. Some of these are in my opinion wrongheaded books, but all are impressive for sheer breadth of knowledge. Johnson never writes a page without at least a couple of surprising facts.

Now he is apparently reduced to inventing a new subject, The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815–1830. He contends that this underrated period is that during which “the matrix of the modern world was largely...