SOURCE: A review of The Renaissance, in Times Literary Supplement, December 15, 2000, p. 28.

In the following review, Rabb offers a positive assessment of The Renaissance, but bemoans the book's lack of illustrations.

Paul Johnson's brief survey of the Renaissance [The Renaissance], part of a new series of short narratives entitled The Universal History, is an enjoyable traversal of familiar territory. Although much that has occupied recent scholarship, such as the rise of civic republicanism, receives little attention, and the opinions are often highly individual (putting Kipling on a par with Chaucer, Shakespeare and Dickens, for instance), there are regular pleasures for the general reader: the conclusion, for one, in the description of warlord aesthetics, that “cultural patronage was the homage that vice paid to virtue.” The focus is on Florence and on the period's achievements in the arts. There are occasional slips, such as crediting Charles V with the...