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Taylor, A(lan) J(ohn) P(ercivale)Current Biography, November 1983Mar. 25, 1906British historian and journalistAddress: h. 32 Twisden Road, London NW51LD. EnglandWidely acknowledged to be one of the most influential British historians of the twentieth century, A.J.P. Taylor is honored in his own country not only for his formidable scholarship but for his prowess as a television personality and journalist. The author of some twenty-six books. Taylor has been called "the pyrotechnician of history" because of his provocative insights. ability to write highly readable narratives authoritatively based on diplomatic documents. and scintillating prose style. Without benefit of notes or teleprompters. he holds millions of viewers spellbound while lecturing on British television on complex historical topics.Not surprisingly. Taylor has alienated some of his academic colleagues by refusing to confine his activities to scholarship. His appearances on radio and television. his love of paradox and irony. his articles in the popular press, and his outspoken criticisms of the British government's foreign poli?cy have earned him a reputation as a ·sardonic gadfly" and as an "eloquent. mischievous· radical" who can be counted on to do or say the unexpected. Since 1963, when he resigned his tutorial fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford. Taylor has primarily made his career outside of academia.Alan John Percivale Taylor was born on March 25, 1906 in Birkdale. Lancashire. England, the only son of Percy Lees Taylor and Constance Thompson Taylor. (Their first child, a girl named Miriam, had died before A.J.P. Taylor was born.) From his parents. the boy inherited a family tradition of non?conformitv, dissent. and a belief in socialism. He was especially close to his father. a well-to-do merchant in the Manchester firm of James Taylor and Sons. which had been founded in the 1870's by Taylor's paternal grandfather as an exporter of cotton cloth to India. After World War I, Percy Taylor sold his interest in the family business for. reasons of health and, according to his son, “turned himself politically into a working man" even though he remained ·unmistakably bourgeois in character and income." Following his father's example, A.J.P. Taylor joined the Independent Labour Party when he was only fifteen.By his own admission. Taylor was "always a ‘loner,’ a solitary only child. out of step in all sorts of ways, rarely influenced by others and learning by the painful process of trial and error." He could read before he was four and as a result of his precocity was often made to sit by himself in the corner with a book in school while the other children were struggling with their letters. His favorite books included Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. and historical novels by such writers as G.A. Henty and William Harrison Ainsworth.When Taylor was ten. his mother, who had recently become a pacifist, decided to remove him from the local public school because she objected to its Officers' Training Corps and to send him to a Quaker boarding school, the Downs School in Colwall. After spending two unhappy years there, the thirteen-year-old Taylor obtained a scholarship to Bootham School. a prestigious Quaker public school in York, where he developed a passion for medieval architecture and an enthusiasm for George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Butler, and H.G. Wells. whose Outline of History he especially admired. When he was fifteen, Taylor passed his matriculation examination and. by his own admission, “went right through [Edward] Gibbon in a fortnight" to impress his history tutor. When he graduated in 1924, he was awarded the Bootham School commemorative scholarship.Entering Oriel College, Oxford. as an exhibitioner (a student on scholarship) in the fall of 1924, Taylor immediately joined the Labour Club. had a brief flirtation with the Oxford Communist Party, and during the General Strike of May 1926 was one of the few undergraduates to take an active stand for labor. His Oxford studies often dealt with medieval history, a subject that did not particularly fas?cinate him, with the exception of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. In 1927 he graduated from Oxford with first class honors in modem history.After making a brief but unsuccessful stab at becoming a lawyer, Taylor decided to resume his studies in history and in 1928 went to Vienna to study diplomatic history under the Austrian historian Alfred F. Pribram and to spend two years working in the diplomatic archives. Never having seen a diplomatic document before, the scholar "simply plunged in at the deep end without any instruction." as he put ii in his autobiography, A Personal History (Atheneum. 1983). His research, supported by a Rockefeller fellowship in the social sciences during the academic year 1929-30, provided the foundation for his first book, The Italian Problem in European Diplomacy 1847-1849 (Manchester Univ. Press. 1934). It was followed by another volume of diplomatic history, Germany's First Bid for Colonies 1884-1885: A Move in Bismarck's European Policy (Macmillan, 1938).In October 1930 Taylor became an assistant lecturer in modern history at Manchester University, where he lectured extemporaneously on modern European history to huge classes that were, to quote his autobiography, “more like a mass meeting than a university lecture.” There he struck up a friendship with the eminent historian Lewis Namier, who joined the history faculty at Manchester University in 1931. and embarked on a career as a journalist by writing book reviews and historical essays for what was then called the Manchester Guardian. Taylor has credited A.P. Wadsworth, then deputy editor and later editor of the Guardian, with helping him to develop a taut, journalistic style of writing. During the 1940’s. he was often commissioned by Wadsworth to write articles on foreign affairs for its editorial opinion page.After becoming a fellow of Magdalen College. Oxford. in the fall of 1938. Taylor began working on the history of the Habsburg Monarchy's later years that had been requested by the British publisher and future Prime Minister Harold. Macmillan. Published under the title of The Habsburg Monarchy 1815-1918: A History of the Austrian Empire and Austria-Hungary (Macmillan. 1941). the book was praised by such distinguished historians as F.M. Powicke and R.W. Seton-Watson. Another product of Taylor's scholarship during the war years was The Course of German History: A Survey of the Development of Germany Since 1815 (Hamish Hamilton. 1945; Coward-McCann. 1946). an intensely anti-German book that was considered by some reviewers to be an overly harsh indictment of Germany.In August 1950 A.J.P. Taylor made his first ap?pearance on In the News, an immensely popular weekly program of political discussion on BBC-TV that featured a regular. team of commentators comprised of Taylor. Labour back-bencher Michael Foot. Conservative back-bencher Robert Boothby, and W.J. Brown. a former Independent Minister of Parliament. The show established Taylor's reputation as a fiery debater and provided him with his credentials as a celebrated political controversialist. After the demise of In the News, the team of Taylor. Foot, Boothby, and Brown were brought together again as regular participants on a similar television program called Free Speech, which was broadcast on British commercial television from 1955 to 1959.During the 1950's A.J. P. Taylor was also much sought after as a journalist because of his reputa?tion as an outspoken don whose articles were invariably straightforward. thought-provoking, and original. In January 1951 he became a columnist for the Sunday Pictorial, moved to the Daily Herald two years later, and in 1956 was recruited to write a column for Lord Beaverbrook's Sunday Express. In 1956 Lord Beaverbrook and A.J.P. Taylor met and became close friends after the historian had favorably reviewed Beaverbrook's Men and Power 1917-1918, and their friendship lasted until the death of the press tycoon in 1965.During his tenure as honorary director of the Beaverbrook Library from 1967 to 1975. Taylor produced his Beayerbrook (Hamish Hamilton; Simon and Schuster. 1972), a monumental and affectionate biography of the British press magnate who was his intimate friend. In his appraisal that appeared in the New York Times Book Review (October 8, 1972), Peter Stansky noted that Beaverbrook was "infused with Taylor's love for his subject. ... What is remarkable in the circumstances is the degree of objectivity that Taylor has been able to muster in writing of him. In the course of his incumbency, Taylor also made excellent use of the Beaverbrook Library's collection of the David Lloyd George papers by editing the diary of Frances Stevenson. his secretary and mistress, and her correspondence with the former Prime Minister.The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848-1918 (Oxford, 1954) furnished convincing proof even to the skeptical that Taylor's popularity as a television personality and mass media journalist had not attenuated his standards of scholarship. Published as the first volume in The Oxford History of Modern Europe, it was widely considered to be one of the best studies of international relations during the seventy-year period that constituted the last age of the European balance of power. In his Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman (Hamish Hamilton; Knopf. 1955), Taylor analyzed Bismarck's career from a psychological as well as a historical perspective.An invitation to deliver the prestigious Ford Lectures at Oxford in 1956 buttressed A.J.P. Taylor's growing fame as a public speaker. Delivered with?out a prepared text to capacity audiences. the lectures focused on Taylor's heroes--men such as Tom Paine, John Bright. and Richard Cobden who had opposed British foreign policy in their day. As a result of his Ford Lectures, which were published as The Trouble Makers: Dissent Over Foreign Policy (Hamish Hamilton. 1957; Indiana Univ. Press. 1958), Taylor began a series of lectures on British commercial television in August 1957 that launched his career as a one-man university of the air.By far the most controversial book of A.J.P. Taylor's long career was his The Origins of the Second World War (Hamish Hamilton. 1961; Atheneum, 1962), as evidenced by the reviews. which ran the gamut from A.L. Rowse's "an exemplary instance of how history should not be written" to Sebastian Haffner's “an almost faultless masterpiece.” Challenging the conventionally accepted view that Hitler alone was responsible for causing World War II ("with Hitler guilty, every other German could claim innocence"), Taylor tried to show that Hitler had unpremeditatedly blundered into war with France and England. His portrayal of Hitler as a traditional German statesman rather than as a demoniacal and ravening warmonger infuriated many of his critics, including Hugh Trevor-Roper, the Regius Professor of Modem History at Oxford, with whom Taylor debated the book on television. Despite Taylor's unimpeachable record of staunch anti-Fascism. some critics went so far as to charge that the book was an attempt to whitewash Hitler or to justify the Neville Chamberlain government's policy of appeasement. "Nothing could be further from my thoughts,’ Taylor noted with some understandable irritation in his preface to the American edition of The Origins of the Second World War.Written at the request of G.N. Clark. editor of The Oxford History of England, Taylor's English History 1914-1945 (Oxford, 1965) was acclaimed as a magnificent contribution to the series and as a tour de force that placed him in the front rank of British historians. It was, according to an anonymous reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement (December 16, 1965), ·a book in which his undoubted talents as a technical craftsman of wide learning are at last happily yoked, not only with his accustomed brilliance as a stylist, but also with the balance and sensibility of a mature historical mind." English History 1914-1945 concludes optimistically with one of Taylor's characteristic paradoxes: "The British empire declined: the condition of the people improved. Its hero is the ordinary Englishman who remained "peaceful and civilized” as well as "tolerant, patient, and generous” through two world wars.Besides his scholarly works, Taylor has produced a number of books--many of them generously illustrated--that are addressed primarily to the general reader. Among them are The First World War: An Illustrated History (published in England in 1963 under that title by Hamish Hamilton and with the title of Illustrated History of the First World War in the United States by Putnam in 1964); From Sarajevo to Potsdam (Thames and Hudson: Harcourt, 1966): War by Time-Table: How the First World War Began (Macdonald: American Heritage, 1969); and The Second World War: An Illustrated History (Hamish Hamilton: Putnam, 1975). the first account of World War II to bring together the war in Europe and the war in the Far East. In 1983, having by his own admission "run out of historical subjects,” Taylor published his diverting autobiography, A Personal History (Hamish Hamilton; Atheneum).A.J.P. Taylor's hundreds of essays and book reviews have appeared in the Observer, New Statesman, Guardian, Times Literary Supplement, New York Review of Books, The Listener, and London Review of Books. Many of them have reappeared in book form in such collections as From Napoleon to Stalin: Comments on European History (Hamish Hamilton: British Book Centre. 1950): Rumours of Wars (Hamish Hamilton; British Book Centre, 1952): Englishmen and Others (Hamish Hamilton, 1956): Politics in Wartime and Other Essays (Hamish Hamilton: Atheneum, 1964); Essays in English History (Hamish Hamilton, 1976): and Politics, Socialism and Historians (Hamish Hamilton; Stein & Day, 1981). Three of Taylor's lecture series for BBC television during the late 1970's were published as The War Lords (Hamish Hamilton: Atheneum, 1978), How Wars Begin (Hamish Hamilton: Atheneum, 1979), and Revolutions and Revolutionaries (Hamish Hamilton: Atheneum, 1980).Although Taylor left Oxford in 1963, he has by no means severed his ties with the university. From 1963 to 1976 he was a research fellow of Magdalen College, and he has since been an honorary fellow. He has been a visiting professor at University College, London, and at the University of Bristol. Among his many distinguished lectureships have been the Raleigh Lecture to the British Academy in 1959, the Leslie Stephen Lecture at Cambridge University in 1961, the Creighton Lecture at London University in 1973, the Andrew Lang Lecture at St. Andrews University in 1974, and the Romanes Lecture at Oxford in 1982. The universities that have bestowed honorary degrees on A.J.P. Taylor include New Brunswick, York. East Anglia, Bristol, Warwick, and Manchester. He was elected to the British Academy in 1956 but later resigned in protest against his colleagues' treatment of the unmasked spy and art historian Anthony Blunt, who was pressured into resigning from the Academy in 1980.Throughout his career A.J.P. Taylor has spoken out on international issues, and he now takes pride in having opposed the Hoare-Laval plan in 1935, the Munich conference in 1938, the Korean War, and the British government's attempts to resolve the Suez Crisis by force. He has campaigned for Labour party candidates, though he has become increasingly disillusioned with the party's policies, and was once asked to become a candidate for Parliament. During the late 1950's he was one of the leaders of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, along with such prominent figures as Bertrand Russell, J.B. Priestley, and Michael Foot. In recent years, he has created some controversy by calling for the immediate withdrawal of British troops from Northern Ireland.An interviewer for the London Observer (June 5, 1983) who visited A.J.P. Taylor at his modest Victorian home in London found him to be "very spry" for his age. Since 1976 Taylor has been married to the former Eva Haraszti, a Hungarian historian whom he met in Budapest. His first marriage, to Margaret Adams Taylor, in 1931, ended in divorce. in 1951, and his second marriage, contracted in 1951, ended in divorce in 1974. By his first marriage, which he has described in A Personal History as "nine years of great happiness" followed by "a decade of intense. almost indescribable misery.” Taylor has four children: Giles, Sebastian, Amelia, and Sophia. By his second wife he has two sons: Crispin and Daniel. His recreations include listening to chamber music and taking long walks in the country.References: Journal of Modern History 49:1+ Mr '77; London Observer p30+ Mr 22 '81 por; Contemporary Authors 1st rev vols 5-8 (1969); International Who's Who, 1982-83; Taylor, A.J.P. A Personal History (1983); Who's Who, 1982; World Authors: 1950-1970 (1975) ................
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