The not so obvious, implicit corollary is that, therefore, the ideas of intellectuals are bad. The obvious thesis is that intellectuals lead bad lives. He is interested not in what they wrote, but in what they did - more precisely, in what others say they did, since the book is based almost entirely on secondary sources. Johnson, the author of ''A History of the Jews'' and ''Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Eighties,'' hurries through a superficial summary of each literary corpus, the ideas, to get to his real concern, the lives of these men - and woman. A final chapter lumps together George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly, Norman Mailer, Kenneth Tynan, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, James Baldwin and Noam Chomsky. Johnson forces to lie on this Procrustean bed, a dozen are given a chapter apiece: Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Brecht, Bertrand Russell, Sartre, Edmund Wilson, Victor Gollancz and Lillian Hellman. marks the true secular intellectual.'' Of the people whom Mr. Moreover, a ''disregard for truth and preference for ideas over people. Paul Johnson's definition is equally idiosyncratic: an intellectual is someone who wants to refashion the world, politically, in accordance with principles of his own devising. Aldous Huxley once defined an intellectual as someone who had found something more interesting than sex. This is a book by an intellectual who tells us not to listen to intellectuals.
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