Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Eighties” (1984) brought the British journalist and historian Paul Johnson to my attention — as it no doubt did to many others — and I learned a great deal from it. His astringent realism was bracing, and his command of fact, relevant to the age of revolution he described, was astonishing and wide-ranging.

In the book, he suggested that the theory of relativity was comparable, in its effect on our perception of the world, to the first use of perspective in art, in ancient Greece; he pointed out that in 1914, old men did not send youth to war, but that youth wanted war, as Rupert Brooke’s poetry demonstrates; he showed that, contrary to conventional wisdom, America did not pursue an isolationist foreign policy during the 1920s, but instead sought to keep the world prosperous by inflating money supply, and he argued that Hitler’s “final solution” originated not just in vicious anti-Semitism but also in the brutal precedent of Ukraine under Stalin, where millions died in forced collectivization.