In the course of a long and distinguished career, Paul Johnson has known popes, presidents, prime ministers, painters, poets, playwrights, even the foul-mouthed publican Muriel Belcher who ran the legendary Colony Club. Harking back to the scandalously anecdotal seventeenth-century book by John Aubrey on the celebrities of his times, Johnson’s “Brief Lives” gives us a unique insight into recent history. But where Aubrey relied on hearsay (however meticulously ascribed), Paul Johnson draws more on personal experience.