A. J. P. Taylor(1906–1990)

Alan John Percivale Taylor was born at Birkdale, the Lancashire seaside village south of Southport, on 25 March 1906, only son of a wealthy Manchester cotton merchant of radical-Left politics and a Quaker pacifist mother. He was raised at the centre of the radical-Liberal Lancashire commercial intelligentsia, schooled at the Quaker boarding school at York, and took a first in modern history at Oriel College, Oxford in 1927.

He spent a year in Vienna researching the diplomatic history of the 1848 revolutions under A. F. Pribram, which gave him the continental-European diplomatic-history training that distinguished his work from the standard English-domestic-political-history training of his cohort. He returned fluent in German, with senior continental-archival experience almost no other British historian of his generation had matched.

He held the Manchester University history lectureship from 1930, was elected to the Magdalen College Oxford fellowship in 1938, and held the Magdalen tutorial fellowship for thirty-eight years. He wrote in those decades the standard works on continental European diplomatic history of his generation, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848-1918 (1954), Bismarck (1955), The Habsburg Monarchy and the closing volume of the Oxford History of England, English History 1914-1945 (1965), which sold a million and a half copies and is the volume most commonly cited as the standard reading on the inter-war and Second-World-War decades.

The Origins of the Second World War (1961) was the book for which he was internationally known thereafter. Its argument, that the war was a contingent outcome of the diplomatic miscalculation of all parties rather than the working-out of a fixed grand-strategic plan, sparked the most-discussed historiographical controversy of the post-war British academic decade, a debate that ran for five years across the historical journals and made the book a permanent set text of the discipline.

His widest public reach was through the BBC. In May 1957 he gave the first unscripted, single-camera, lecture-without-notes televised history lectures, History Today, speaking for thirty minutes without script or autocue, the foundational unscripted-talking-head televised-history format, which he continued across the next three decades through The Russian Revolution, How Wars Begin and How Wars End. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1956 and died in London on 7 September 1990, eighty-four years old. The Taylor name, the medieval occupational taillour, the cutter of cloth, he carried from a Birkdale cotton-merchant family into the popular British televised-history tradition and the standard post-war Oxford historical-monograph register.