A.J.P. Taylor

Alan John Percivale Taylor (25 March 1906 – 7 September 1990) was a British 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). 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. 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.

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 father's 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 the 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. Despite his break with the Communist Party, he visited the Soviet Union in 1925, and again in 1934.

Academic career

Taylor graduated from Oxford in 1927 with first-class honours. 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 Revolution 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 University of Manchester from 1930 to 1938. 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. 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, writing: "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, and through him, got to know President Beneš who lived in London.Burk 2000 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 Abbots-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".Burk 2000

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.Burk 2000 ''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.Burk 2000 Taylor argued that the Czechoslovaks would have to "explain" 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 sidesBurk 2000 ''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 eneš'sintegrity 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. n contrastthe 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 together 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, whom he married in 1976.

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.

''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."

In the book Taylor argued against the widespread belief that the outbreak of the Second World War (specifically between Germany, Poland, the United Kingdom and France, September 1939) was the result of an intentional plan on the part of Adolf Hitler. He began his book with the statement that too many people have accepted uncritically what he called the "Nuremberg Thesis", that the Second World War was the result of criminal conspiracy by a small gang comprising Hitler and his associates. He regarded the "Nuremberg Thesis" as too convenient for too many people and held that it shielded the blame for the war from the leaders of other states, let the German people avoid any responsibility for the war and created a situation where West Germany was a respectable Cold War ally against the Soviets.

Taylor's thesis was that Hitler was not the demoniacal figure of popular imagination but in foreign affairs a normal German leader. Citing Fritz Fischer, he argued that the foreign policy of Nazi Germany was the same as those of the Weimar Republic and the German Empire. Moreover, in a partial break with his view of German history advocated in '' The Course of German History'', he argued that Hitler was not just a normal German leader but also a normal Western leader. As a normal Western leader, Hitler was no better or worse than Gustav Stresemann, Neville Chamberlain or Édouard Daladier. His argument was that Hitler wished to make Germany the strongest power in Europe but he did not want or plan war. The outbreak of war in 1939 was an unfortunate accident caused by mistakes on everyone's part and was not a part of Hitler's plan.

Taylor portrayed Hitler as a grasping opportunist with no beliefs other than the pursuit of power and anti-Semitism. He argued that Hitler did not possess any sort of programme and his foreign policy was one of drift and seizing chances as they offered themselves. He did not consider Hitler's anti-Semitism unique: he argued that millions of Germans were just as ferociously anti-Semitic as Hitler and there was no reason to single out Hitler for sharing the beliefs of millions of others.

Taylor argued that the basic problem with an interwar Europe was a flawed Treaty of Versailles that was sufficiently onerous to ensure that the overwhelming majority of Germans would always hate it, but insufficiently onerous in that it failed to destroy Germany's potential to be a Great Power once more. In this way, Taylor argued that the Versailles Treaty was destabilising, for sooner or later the innate power of Germany that the Allies had declined to destroy in 1918–1919 would inevitably reassert itself against the Versailles Treaty and the international system established by Versailles that the Germans regarded as unjust and thus had no interest in preserving. Though Taylor argued that the Second World War was not inevitable and that the Versailles Treaty was nowhere near as harsh as contemporaries like John Maynard Keynes believed, what he regarded as a flawed peace settlement made the war more likely than not.

''English History 1914–1945''

In 1965 he rebounded from the controversy surrounding ''The Origins of the Second World War'' with the spectacular success of his book '' English History 1914–1945'', his only venture into social and cultural history, where he offered a loving, affectionate portrayal of the years between 1914 and 1945. ''English History 1914–1945'' was an enormous best-seller and in its first year in print sold more than all of the previous volumes of the ''Oxford History of England'' combined. Though he felt there was much to be ashamed of in British history, especially in regard to Ireland, he was very proud to be British and more specifically English. He was fond of stressing his nonconformist Northern English background and saw himself as part of a grand tradition of radical dissent that he regarded as the real glorious history of England.

''The Reichstag Fire'' (introduction)

In 1964 Taylor wrote the introduction for ''The Reichstag Fire'' by the journalist Fritz Tobias. He thus became the first English-language historian and the first historian after Hans Mommsen to accept the conclusions of the book, that the Nazis had not set the ''Reichstag'' on fire in 1933 and that Marinus van der Lubbe had acted alone. Tobias and Taylor argued that the new Nazi government had been looking for something to increase its share of the vote in the elections of 5 March 1933 so as to activate the Enabling Act, and that van der Lubbe had serendipitously (for the Nazis) provided it by burning down the Reichstag. Even without the Reichstag fire, the Nazis were quite determined to destroy German democracy. In Taylor's opinion, van der Lubbe had made their task easier by providing a pretext. Moreover, the German Communist propaganda chief Willi Münzenberg and his OGPU handlers had manufactured all of the evidence implicating the Nazis in the arson. In particular, Tobias and Taylor pointed out that the so-called "secret tunnels" that supposedly gave the Nazis access to the ''Reichstag'' were in fact tunnels for water piping. At the time Taylor was widely attacked by many other historians for endorsing what was considered to be a self-evident perversion of established historical facts.

''War by Timetable''

In his 1969 book ''War by Timetable'', Taylor examined the origins of the First World War, concluding that though all of the great powers wished to increase their own power relative to the others, none consciously sought war before 1914. Instead, he argued that all of the great powers believed that if they possessed the ability to mobilise their armed forces faster than any of the others, this would serve as a sufficient deterrent to avoid war and allow them to achieve their foreign policy aims. Thus, the general staffs of the great powers developed elaborate timetables to mobilise faster than any of their rivals. When the crisis broke in 1914, though none of the statesmen of Europe wanted a world war, the need to mobilise faster than potential rivals created an inexorable movement towards war. Thus Taylor claimed that the leaders of 1914 became prisoners of the logic of the mobilisation timetables and the timetables that were meant to serve as deterrent to war instead relentlessly brought war.

''Beaverbrook: A Biography''

In the 1950s and 1960s, Taylor befriended Lord Beaverbrook and later wrote his biography in 1972. Beaverbrook, Canadian in origin, was a Conservative who believed strongly in the British Empire and whose entry into politics was in support of Bonar Law, a Conservative leader strongly connected with the establishment of Northern Ireland. Despite the disdain for most politicians expressed in his writings, Taylor was fascinated by politics and politicians and often cultivated relations with those who possessed power. Beside Lord Beaverbrook, whose company Taylor very much enjoyed, his favourite politician was the Labour Party leader Michael Foot, whom he often described as the greatest Prime Minister Britain never had.

Introductions

Taylor also wrote significant introductions to British editions of Marx's ''The Communist Manifesto'' and of '' Ten Days that Shook the World'', by John Reed. He had long been an advocate of a treaty with the Soviet Union so British Communists expected him to be friendly. In 1963, the British Communist Party, which held the copyright to ''Ten Days that Shook the World'' in the United Kingdom, offered Taylor the opportunity to write the introduction to a new edition. The introduction Taylor wrote was fairly sympathetic towards the Bolsheviks. However, it also pointed out certain contradictions between Reed's book and the official historiography in the Soviet Union—for instance, that Leon Trotsky played a very prominent, heroic role in ''Ten Days That Shook The World'' while in 1963 Trotsky was almost a non-person in Soviet historiography, mentioned only in terms of abuse. The British Communist Party rejected Taylor's introduction as anti-Soviet. The rejection annoyed Taylor. When the copyright expired in 1977 and a non-Communist publisher reissued the book, asking Taylor to write the introduction, he strengthened some of his criticisms. Taylor also wrote the introduction for '' Fighter: The True Story of the Battle of Britain'' by Len Deighton.

Journalism

Starting in 1931, Taylor worked as book reviewer for the '' Manchester Guardian'', and from 1957 he was a columnist with the ''Observer''. In 1951 Taylor made his first move into mass-market journalism, spending just over a year as a columnist at the tabloid '' Sunday Pictorial'', later renamed the ''Sunday Mirror''. His first article was an attack on the stance of the United Nations during the Korean War, in which he argued that the UN was merely a front for American policy. After leaving the ''Sunday Pictorial'' in 1952, in the wake of editor Philip Zec's dismissal, he began writing a weekly column the following year for the ''Daily Herald'' until 1956.

From 1957 until 1982 he wrote for the '' Sunday Express'', owned by his friend and patron Lord Beaverbrook. His first column for that paper was "Why Must We Soft-Soap The Germans?", in which he complained that the majority of Germans were still Nazis at heart and argued the European Economic Community was little more than an attempt by the Germans to achieve via trade what they failed to accomplish through arms in the First and Second World Wars. At a time when the relationship with the EEC was a major issue in Britain, Taylor's pro-Commonwealth Euroscepticism became a common theme in many of his articles. Other frequent targets were the BBC, the anti-smoking lobby, and reversing his earlier stance, the motor car, with Taylor calling for all private motor vehicles to be banned.

Broadcasting

The Second World War gave Taylor the opportunity to branch out from print journalism, initially into radio and then later television. On 17 March 1942 Taylor made the first of seven appearances on ''The World at War – Your Questions Answered'' broadcast by BBC Forces' Radio. After the war Taylor became one of the first television historians. His appearances began with his role as a panellist on the BBC
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