Some, like his New Statesman colleague Alan Watkins, also detected a strain of snobbery. In one column, Johnson criticized a politician as not truly a gentleman. Johnson's break was occasioned mainly by his fears about the rising power of Britain's unions. She'd get things wrong. It was thanks to the Thatcher connection that Johnson began to develop an American following.
Relativism is the great disease of modernity to most conservatives.
This is the book that makes the profoundest and most wide-ranging case for that idea. It remains in print, having sold more than 200,000 copies. Similarly popular is ''Intellectuals,'' published in 1988. In a series of chapter-length biographical sketches, Johnson culls the most salacious bits in an attempt to show that believers in social change are invariably nasty people. Johnson's intellectuals, then, are men on the left who behaved badly.