Paul Johnson

Paul Johnson was a British historian, journalist, and author whose prolific body of work made him one of the most widely read popular historians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Born in 1928, he edited the New Statesman and wrote over forty books. The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830 is an epic history of the period that created the modern world — the years immediately following the Napoleonic Wars when industrialisation, democracy, and cultural revolution transformed human civilisation. Johnson's other major works include A History of the Modern World, A History of the English People, and A History of Christianity. Johnson died in 2023. His audiobooks and books offer listeners and readers sweeping, opinionated popular history from one of the most prolific historians of modern times.