Paul Johnson was born in 1928 and educated at Stonyhurst and Magdalen College, Oxford. He was editor of the New Statesman between 1965 and 1970 and from 1974 to 1977 was a member of the Royal Commission on the Press. He has written on current affairs, travel and religion and is the author of the widely praised Elizabeth I: A Study in Power and Intellect, Pope John XXIII, which won the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award 1975 and A History of the Modern World from 1917 to the 1980s. He has recently published A History of the Jews, a companion volume to A History of Christianity.

Paul Johnson is married and has three sons and a daughter. He lives in Buckinghamshire and his hobbies are mountaineering and painting.

The failures and achievements of one of the most influential religions of all time.

"Masterly... it combines great wealth of scholarship, including many fascinating byways as well as the main highways, with a vigorous, confident style, a kind of innate intensity which carries the narrative along so that it rarely falters and is never dull... It is a huge and crowded canvas --- a trememdous theme running through twenty centuries of history --- a cosmic soap opera involving kings and beggars, philosophers and crackpots, scholars and illiterate exaltes, popes and pilgrims and wild anchorities in the wilderness, with a story-line at once of infinite variety and inexorable necessity ... Johnson works out his own presentation of it all with verve, imaginative insight and the lofty self-confidence of a practised editorialist." - Malcolm Muggeridge in the New Statesman