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Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney, by Paul Johnson (HarperCollins, 320 pp., $25.95)
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IN 1988, the British historian Paul Johnson published a slim volume called Intellectuals. What is an intellectual? Johnson defined the beast as "someone who thinks ideas are more important than people," and proceeded to take readers on an entertaining, though decidedly unedifying, tour of typical intellectuals from Shelley and Karl Marx to Bertrand Russell and D. H. Lawrence. My, what an unlovely tribe! Self-absorbed, hypocritical louts, most of them, infatuated above all with the thought of their own higher virtue.
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