A. J. P. Taylor

Alan John Percivale Taylor (25 March 1906 – 7 September 1990) was an English historian focused on European diplomacy in the 19th and 20th centuries. He worked as a journalist and broadcaster, gaining fame through his televised lectures. Historian Richard Overy called him "the Macaulay of our age" for blending scholarly rigor with popular appeal. In a 2011 *History Today* poll, he ranked fourth among the most important historians of the preceding 60 years. Taylor was born in Birkdale, Southport, Lancashire, the only child of cotton merchant Percy Lees Taylor and schoolmistress Constance Sumner Taylor. In 1919, his family moved to Ashton-on-Ribble, Preston, where both parents' families had long lived. His wealthy, left-wing parents were pacifists who opposed the First World War and sent him to Quaker schools—The Downs School at Colwall and Bootham School in York—as a protest. His grandmother came from an old Quaker family. A contemporary at Bootham, Geoffrey Barraclough, described Taylor as "a most arresting, stimulating, vital personality, violently anti-bourgeois and anti-Christian." In 1924, he entered Oriel College, Oxford, to study modern history, becoming the first undergraduate to serve as secretary of the junior common room in 1925 and 1926. In the 1920s, his mother Constance was a Comintern member, and an uncle co-founded the Communist Party of Great Britain. A suffragette, feminist, and advocate of free love, she had extramarital affairs, notably with communist Henry Sara, who became a surrogate father to Taylor. Taylor recalled his mother as domineering and his father as enjoying exasperating her. He had a close bond with his father. Recruited into the Communist Party by family friend and military historian Tom Wintringham while at Oriel, Taylor was a member from 1924 to 1926. He left over the party's ineffective stance during the 1926 General Strike, thereafter supporting the Labour Party for over sixty years. He visited the Soviet Union in 1925 and again in 1934. After graduating from Oxford in 1927 with a first-class degree, Taylor briefly worked as a legal clerk before postgraduate study in Vienna on the Chartist movement’s impact on the 1848 revolutions. When that topic proved unworkable, he spent two years studying Italian unification, publishing his first book, *The Italian Problem in European Diplomacy, 1847–49*, in 1934. He lectured in history at Victoria University of Manchester from 1930 to 1938, initially living with his wife in an unfurnished flat at 148 Wilmslow Road in Didsbury, later buying a house in Disley, on the Peak District’s edge. In 1938, he became a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, remaining until 1976, and lectured in modern history at Oxford from 1938 to 1963. His lectures were so popular he scheduled them for 8:30 a.m. to prevent overcrowding. In 1962, Taylor reviewed Cecil Woodham-Smith’s *The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845–1849*, writing: "All Ireland was a Belsen... The English governing class ran true to form. They had killed two million Irish people." He added that if the death rate from the Great Famine was not higher, it "was not for want of trying" by the British government, quoting Benjamin Jowett’s remark about a political economist who said the famine would kill no more than a million people, "and that would scarcely be enough to do much good." Taylor later reprinted the review as "Genocide" in his 1976 book *Essays in English History*. In 1964, Oxford declined to renew his university lecturer appointment, a decision linked to controversy over his book *The Origins of the Second World War*. He kept his college fellowship but moved to London, lecturing at the Institute of Historical Research at University College London and the Polytechnic of North London. A 1965 festschrift organised by Martin Gilbert helped rehabilitate him, and he received two more festschriften, in 1976 and 1986, rare honours reflecting his popularity among former students. During the Second World War, Taylor served in the Home Guard and befriended Central European émigré statesmen, including former Hungarian President Count Mihály Károlyi and Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš. These friendships deepened his understanding of the region and may explain his sympathetic portrayals of them, especially Károlyi, whom he depicted as saintly.