No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2008
Alan Taylor was something of a transitional figure among British historians. He began with more than a touch of the old-style gentleman scholar about him but went on to become an early example of the media personality, in some ways a second-half-of-the-twentieth-century variant of this. Yet he was a substantial scholar who could draw large academic audiences as well as someone who could present history to a big national audience. He wrote on traditional topics in a traditional manner, but he took narrative history to new heights.
1 For his family background see Taylor, A. J. P., A Personal History (thereafter Taylor, Personal History) (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1983)Google Scholar; Sisman, A., A. J. P. Taylor (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994)Google Scholar; Wrigley, C. J., ‘Introduction’ to A. J. P. Taylor: A Complete Bibliography (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Ibid., ‘Alan John Percivale Taylor 1906–1990’, Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol. 82 (1993), 493–524.
2 Observer, 29 July 1979, 16 May 1965.
3 Manchester Guardian, 4 Dec. 1936.
4 ‘Accident Prone’, Journal of Modern History, Vol. 49, no. 1 (1977), 7.Google Scholar
5 Observer, 21 March 1971. Times Literary Supplement (thereafter TLS), 15 April 1973; Taylor, A. J. P., English History 1914–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 153.Google Scholar
6 Taylor to Sir George Clark, 14 June 1964, Sir G. N. Clark Papers, the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
7 Taylor to Clark, 16 May 1961, Clark Papers.
8 Taylor to Clark, 5 March 1964, Clark Papers. He defended his use of ‘England’ not ‘Britain’ in his Oxford History in the Journal of Modern History, Vol. 47, no. 4 (1975), 622–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and repeated the use of ‘English’ in one of the Penguin collections of his essays (see n. 24).
9 Morris, M., ed., Boswell's Life of Johnson (Globe Edition, Macmillan, 1893), 444, 530 and 217Google Scholar respectively (passages of 3 April 1778, 1780 and 1770). Johnson used ‘Scotchman’. He also liked to think he ‘hit hard’ in controversy.
10 Taylor to George Barnes, 17 May 1947, BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham.
11 Radio Times, Vol. 154, issue 1995, 1 Feb. 1962, 4.
12 Taylor, Personal History, 207.
13 Taylor to C. H. Roberts, 26 Sept. 1965, Oxford University Press Archives.
14 ‘Diplomatic History’, a book review, Manchester Guardian, 23 May 1939.
15 ‘The Rise and Fall of “Pure” Diplomatic History’, in the ‘Historical Supplement’ to the TLS, 6 Jan. 1956. Repr. most recently in Taylor, A. J. P., From Boer War To Cold War: Essays in Twentieth Century European History (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1994).Google Scholar
16 Diary, London Review of Books, 4 March 1982. There is a variant in ‘War in our Time’, the Romanes Lecture for 1981, given in the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, in March 1982, published in the London Review of Books, 18 March 1982. Both repr. in his An Old Man's Diary (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1984), 53–68.
17 Taylor to the author (CJW), 3 Oct. 1978.
18 This was very apparent in what was available for the selection of his essays, From Napoleon to the Second International: Essays in Nineteenth-century European History (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1993).Google Scholar
19 ‘European Mediation and the Agreement of Villafranca, 1859’, English Historical Review (thereafter EHR), Vol. 51, no. 201 (1936), 52–78.Google Scholar
20 ‘Prelude to Fashoda: the Question of the Upper Nile, 1894–95’, EHR, Vol. 65, no. 254 (1950), 52–80Google Scholar, and ‘British Policy in Morocco 1886–1902’, Ibid., Vol. 66, no. 260 (1951), 342–74. (The other two essays appeared in Revue Historique, 1950 and 1952.)
21 ‘The Secrets of Diplomacy’, TLS, 12 April 1947. He withdrew the vindication comment in the TLS, 3 May 1947.
22 See n. 14. He also discussed the captured German documents in ‘Foreign Office archives: Publishing the German Documents’, Manchester Guardian, 18 July 1949.
23 The Struggle for Mastery, 575.
24 Essays in English History (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1976), 129.Google Scholar
25 Taylor, Personal History, 197. He also expressed surprise that he had been able to write such a large book in a year. In fact he had not, for he had begun a book on the 1878–1914 period for Hamish Hamilton several years earlier.
26 Taylor, Personal History, 233.
27 For reassessments of The Origins of the Second World War (1961), see, alia, inter, Mason, T., ‘Some Origins of the Second World War’, Past and Present, Vol. 29 (1964), 67–87Google Scholar; Robertson, E. M., ed., The Origins of the Second World War: Historical Interpretations (London: Macmillan, 1971)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Louis, W. R., ed., The Origins of the Second World War: A. J. P. Taylor and his Critics (New York: Wiley, 1972)Google Scholar; Martel, G., ed., The Origins of the Second World War Reconsidered: The A. J. P. Taylor Debate after Twenty-five Years (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986)Google Scholar; Boyce, R. and Robertson, , eds., Paths to War: New Essays on the Origins of the Second World War (London: Macmillan, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Bosworth, R. J. B., Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima: History Writing and the Second World War 1945–1990 (London: Routledge, 1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
28 Kennedy, P., ‘A. J. P. Taylor and “Profound Forces” in History’, in Wrigley, C. J., ed., Warfare, Diplomacy and Politics: Essays in Honour of A. J. P. Taylor (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1986), 14–28Google Scholar (quotation, 25).
29 Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1955), 102.Google Scholar
30 ‘Accident Prone, or What Happened Next’, Journal of Modern History, Vol. 49, no. 1 (03 1977), 1–18Google Scholar (quotations, 9 and 14).
31 Taylor, Personal History, 113 and 91.
32 ‘Accident Prone’, 9 (following on directly from his ‘partly as an Austrian’ comment – see n. 29).
33 For example, see ‘Accident Prone’, 7. When Alan Taylor helped me prepare the bibliography of his writings, the only time he tried to influence my views was on Namier (with one minor success, Complete Bibliography, 59).
34 For critical comments by him of Namier's work before their personal rift, see ‘The Namier View of History’, TLS, 28 Aug. 1953, supplement ‘Thoughts and Second Thoughts upon some Outstanding Books of the Half Century 1900–1950’, pp. xxii–xxiii.
35 Taylor to Hamish Hamilton, 3 Nov. [1946], Hamish Hamilton Ltd Archive, Bristol University Library.
36 Thompson, Paul, The Voice of the Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 62, 94.Google Scholar
37 These comments are not intended to suggest that there was nothing more to the friendship.
38 Taylor to Roger Machell, 27 Feb. [1957], Hamish Hamilton Ltd Archive. Victor Gollancz Papers, Modern Record Centre, Warwick University.
39 Taylor, Personal History, 244.
40 Taylor to Clark, 18 Dec. 1967, Clark Papers.
41 A comment (and variants on it) frequently made by him. For example, Personal History, 235.
42 For a discussion of several of the earlier essays, see Fischer, David Hackett, Historians' Fallacies: Towards a Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 34–5 and 73–81.Google Scholar
43 The Origins of the Second World War.
44 Taylor to Hamish Hamilton, 3 Nov. [1946], Hamish Hamilton Ltd Archive.
45 Anna Kallin to Taylor, 29. Jan. 1960, BBC Written Archives.
46 ‘Who Burnt the Reichstag? The Story of a Legend’, History Today, Vol. 10 (08 1960), 515–22.Google ScholarTobias, Fritz, The Reichstag Fire. Legend and Truth, trans. Arnold Pomerans (London: Secker and Warburg, 1963).Google Scholar
47 ‘Accident Prone’, 17; Taylor, , Letters To Eva 1969–83 (London: Century, 1991), 19.Google Scholar ‘The Namier View’, xxiii.