Alan John Percivale Taylor (25 March 1906 – 7 September 1990) was an English historian who specialised in 19th- and 20th-century European diplomacy. Both a journalist and a broadcaster, he became well known to millions through his television lectures. His combination of academic rigour and popular appeal led the historian Richard Overy to describe him as "the Macaulay of our age". In a 2011 poll by History Today magazine, he was named the fourth most important historian of the previous 60 years.
Life Early life Taylor was born in 1906 in Birkdale, Southport, which was then part of Lancashire, only child of cotton merchant Percy Lees Taylor and schoolmistress Constance Sumner Taylor (née Thompson). In 1919 his family returned to Ashton-on-Ribble, Preston, where both his parents' families had lived for several decades. His wealthy parents held left-wing views, which he inherited. Both his parents were pacifists who vocally opposed the First World War and sent their son to Quaker schools as a way of protesting against the war (his grandmother was from an old Quaker family). These schools included The Downs School at Colwall and Bootham School in York.Wrigley 2006 Geoffrey Barraclough, a contemporary at Bootham School, remembered Taylor as "a most arresting, stimulating, vital personality, violently anti-bourgeois and anti-Christian".Burk 2002, p.41 In 1924, he went to Oriel College, Oxford, to study modern history. During his time as an undergraduate, in 1925 and 1926, he was the first student to hold the position of secretary of the junior common room.
In the 1920s, Taylor's mother, Constance, was a member of the Comintern while one of his uncles was a founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Constance was a suffragette, feminist and advocate of free love who practised her teachings via a string of extramarital affairs, most notably with Henry Sara, a communist who in many ways became Taylor's surrogate father. Taylor has mentioned in his reminiscences that his mother was domineering, but his father enjoyed exasperating her by following his own ways. Taylor had a close relationship with his father and enjoyed his quirkiness. Taylor himself was recruited into the Communist Party of Great Britain by a friend of the family, the military historian Tom Wintringham, while at Oriel; a member from 1924 to 1926. Taylor broke with that party over what he considered to be its ineffective stand during the 1926 General Strike. After leaving, he was an ardent supporter of the Labour Party for the rest of his life, remaining a member for over sixty years. After leaving the Communist Party he visited the Soviet Union in 1925 and in 1934.
Academic career Taylor graduated from Oxford in 1927 with a first-class honours degree. After working briefly as a legal clerk, he began his post-graduate work, going to Vienna to study the impact of the Chartist movement on the Revolutions of 1848. When this topic turned out not to be feasible, he switched to studying the question of Italian unification over a two-year period. This resulted in his first book, The Italian Problem in European Diplomacy, 1847–49 published in 1934.
Manchester years Taylor was a lecturer in history in the Victoria University of Manchester from 1930 to 1938."Our History" University of Manchester website He initially lived with his wife in an unfurnished flat on the top floor of an eighteenth-century house called The Limes, at 148 Wilmslow Road, which was set back from the street, opposite the entrance to Didsbury Park, at the southern end of Didsbury village.Burk 2002 A few years later Taylor purchased a house in the village of Disley on the edge of the Peak District.
Oxford years He became a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1938, a post he held until 1976. He was also a lecturer in modern history at the University of Oxford from 1938 to 1963. At Oxford he was such a popular speaker that he had to give his lectures at 8:30 a.m. to avoid the room becoming over-crowded.
In 1962, Taylor wrote in a review of The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845–1849 by Cecil Woodham-Smith that: "All Ireland was a Belsen. ... The English governing class ran true to form. They had killed two million Irish people." Taylor added that if the death rate from the Great Famine was not higher it "was not for want of trying" on the part of the British government, quoting Benjamin Jowett, the Master of Balliol College: "I have always felt a certain horror of political economists since I heard one of them say that the Famine in Ireland would not kill more than a million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do much good." Taylor later reprinted his book review under the stark title "Genocide" in his 1976 book Essays in English History."
In 1964, whilst he retained his college fellowship, the University of Oxford declined to renew Taylor's appointment as a university lecturer in modern history. This apparently sudden decision came in the aftermath of the controversy around his book The Origins of the Second World War. Moving to London, he became a lecturer at the Institute of Historical Research at University College London and at the Polytechnic of North London.Bernstein, Richard (8 September 1990) "A.J.P. Taylor, British Historian, Dies" in The New York Times
An important step in Taylor's "rehabilitation" was a festschrift organised in his honour by Martin Gilbert in 1965. He was honoured with two more festschriften, in 1976 and 1986. The festschriften were testaments to his popularity with his former students as receiving even a single festschrift is considered to be an extraordinary and rare honour.
Second World War During the Second World War, Taylor served in the Home Guard and befriended émigré statesmen from Central Europe, such as the former Hungarian President Count Mihály Károlyi and Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš. These friendships helped to enhance his understanding of the region. His friendship with Beneš and Károlyi may help explain his sympathetic portrayal of them, in particular Károlyi, whom Taylor portrayed as a saintly figure. Taylor became friends with Hubert Ripka, the press attache for Beneš, who lived in Oxford. Through him, he got to know President Beneš who lived in London. Taylor wrote that because Beneš was a President, "he was not allowed to brave the front line in London and had to live in a sovereign state at Aston Abbotts – a Rothschild house of, for them, a modest standard. Bored and isolated, Beneš summoned an audience whatever he could and I was often swept over to Aston Abbots in the presidential car".
In 1943, Taylor wrote his first pamphlet, Czechoslovakia's Place in a Free Europe, explaining his view that Czechoslovakia would after the war serve as a "bridge" between the Western world and the Soviet Union. Czechoslovakia's Place in a Free Europe began as a lecture Taylor had given at the Czechoslovak Institute in London on 29 April 1943 and at the suggestion of Jan Masaryk was turned into a pamphlet to explain Czechoslovakia's situation to the British people. Taylor argued that the Czechoslovaks would have to "explain" democracy to the Soviets and "explain" socialism to the British, saying: "You must appear to the English people as communists and to the Russians as democrats and therefore receive nothing, but abuse from both sides Czechoslovakia's Place in a Free Europe reflected Beneš's theory of "convergence" as he felt based on what he was seeing in wartime Britain that the western nations would become socialist after the war while the Soviet Union would become more democratic. In 1945, Taylor wrote: "Beck, Stojadinović, Antonescu and Bonnet despised [Beneš's] integrity and prided themselves on their cunning; but their countries, too, fell before the German aggressor and every step they took has made the resurrection of their countries more difficult. [In contrast] the foreign policy of Dr. Beneš during the present war has won for Czechoslovakia a secure future." During the same period, Taylor was employed by the Political Warfare Executive as an expert on Central Europe and frequently spoke on the radio and at various public meetings. During the war, he lobbied for British recognition of Josip Broz Tito's Partisans as the legitimate government of Yugoslavia.
Resignation from British Academy In 1979, Taylor resigned in protest from the British Academy over its dismissal of Anthony Blunt, who had been exposed as a Soviet spy. Taylor took the position that:
Personal life Taylor married three times. He married his first wife Margaret Adams in 1931. They had four children and divorced in 1951. For some time in the 1930s, he and his wife shared a house with the writer Malcolm Muggeridge and his wife Kitty. From the 1940s Margaret's infatuations with Robert Kee and Dylan Thomas pushed the couple towards separation. His second wife was Eve Crosland, the sister of Anthony Crosland MP, whom Taylor married in 1951; they had two children and divorced in 1974. His third wife was the Hungarian historian Éva Haraszti. They married in 1976.Taylor, A. J. P. (1983) A Personal History. London: Hamish Hamilton. p.267
Work The Italian Problem in European Diplomacy, 1847–49 Taylor's first book, published in 1934, addressed the question of Italian unification The Italian Problem in European Diplomacy, 1847–49. However, Taylor's speciality was in Central European, British and diplomatic history. He was especially interested in the Habsburg dynasty and Bismarck. His main mentors in this period were the Austrian-born historian Alfred Francis Pribram and the Polish-born historian Sir Lewis Namier. Taylor's earlier writings reflected Pribram's favourable opinion of the Habsburgs; however, his 1941 book The Habsburg Monarchy 1809–1918 (published in a revised edition in 1948) showed the influence of Namier's unfavourable views. In The Habsburg Monarchy, Taylor stated that the Habsburgs saw their realms entirely as a tool for foreign policy and thus could never build a genuine nation-state. To hold their realm together, they resorted to playing one ethnic group off against another and promoted German and Magyar hegemony over the other ethnic groups in Austria-Hungary.
The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848–1918 In 1954 he published his masterpiece, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848–1918, and followed it up with The Trouble Makers in 1957, a critical study of British foreign policy. The Trouble Makers was a celebration of those who had criticised the government over foreign policy, a subject dear to his heart. The Trouble Makers had originally been the Ford Lectures in 1955 and was his favourite book by far. When invited to deliver the Ford Lectures, he was initially at a loss for a topic; and it was his friend Alan Bullock who suggested the topic of foreign policy dissent.Addison, Paul (1993) "Introduction" to Taylor, A. J. P. The Troublemakers Pimlico.
Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman The recurring theme of accidents deciding history appeared in Taylor's best-selling 1955 biography of Bismarck. Taylor controversially argued that the Iron Chancellor had unified Germany more by accident than by design; a theory that contradicted those put forward by the historians Heinrich von Sybel, Leopold von Ranke and Heinrich von Treitschke in the latter years of the 19th century and by other historians more recently.
The Origins of the Second World War In 1961, he published his most controversial book, The Origins of the Second World War, which earned him a reputation as a revisionist.Martel 1999, p.1 Gordon Martel notes that "it made a profound impact. The book became a classic and a central point of reference in all discussion on the Second World War."