SOURCE: “The Historian as Tattler,” in New Republic, August 12, 1991, pp. 36–40.

In the following negative review of The Birth of the Modern, Stone finds serious flaws in Johnson's “monstrous, prejudiced, and incoherent book.”

This is no brief and brilliant essay. [The Birth of the Modern] is a mammoth tome of nearly 1,100 pages. (Why are so many books a thousand pages long these days? Have publishers gone mad?) In his preface, Paul Johnson gives warning of what is to come: “Sometimes readers will have to bear with me while we retrace our steps a little before resuming the onward march: but we always get there in the end.” Well, yes and no. It would be easier if Johnson offered a clear account as to where “there” is, but he never does.

Before we get to the strengths and the weaknesses of the book's argument, however, it is essential first to...