A. J. P. Taylor(1906–1990)

Alan John Percivale Taylor was born on 25 March 1906 at Birkdale, the Lancashire seaside village south of Southport, the only son of Percy Taylor, a wealthy Manchester cotton merchant of staunchly socialist politics, and Constance Sumner Thompson. The household was upper-middle-class Lancashire-Liberal of the Edwardian decade: the father had inherited a substantial Manchester-cotton-import fortune from his own father and had directed it into the radical-Left causes of the period (he was a financial backer of the Independent Labour Party from 1910 onwards, helped fund the early *New Statesman* magazine, and was one of the founder donors of the 1916 Anti-Conscription League). Constance was a Quaker pacifist who took the Birkdale household onto the Manchester Pankhurst suffragist circuit through the 1908 to 1914 period. The boy was raised at the centre of this radical-Liberal Lancashire commercial intelligentsia.

He was schooled at Bootham, the Quaker boarding school at York, from twelve to seventeen, took his place at Oriel College, Oxford in 1924 to read modern history, and graduated with first-class honours in 1927 at twenty-one. He went to Vienna in 1928 for a year of research on the diplomatic history of the 1848 European revolutions under the Austrian-Czech diplomatic historian A. F. Pribram. The Vienna year gave him the foundational continental-European diplomatic-history training that distinguished his subsequent work from the standard Oxford-Cambridge English-domestic-political-history training of his Anglo-academic generation; he was, by his return to England in 1929, fluent in German, conversational in Czech and French, and reading working Italian, with senior continental-archival research experience that almost no other British academic historian of his cohort had matched.

He held the Manchester University history lectureship from 1930 to 1938, was elected to the Magdalen College Oxford fellowship in 1938 at thirty-two, and held the Magdalen tutorial fellowship for the next thirty-eight years to 1976. The Magdalen period was the academic foundation of his reputation. 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, the foundational Oxford-Press one-volume diplomatic history of the long-nineteenth-century European state system), *Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman* (1955), *The Trouble Makers: Dissent over Foreign Policy 1792-1939* (1957), *The Habsburg Monarchy 1809-1918* (1948), and the closing volume of the Oxford History of England, *English History 1914-1945* (1965). The Oxford History volume in particular sold one and a half million copies across the next twenty-five years and is the post-war British popular-history volume most commonly cited as the standard reading on the inter-war and Second-World-War decades by general English-speaking readers.

*The Origins of the Second World War*, published by Hamish Hamilton in March 1961, was the popular-historiographical event for which he was internationally known thereafter. The book argued the position that Hitler had not pursued a coherent grand strategy of world conquest from a fixed 1933 starting point but had instead taken opportunist successive moves through the 1933-1939 decade that the appeasement-era British and French governments had repeatedly accommodated; the resulting Second World War was, on Taylor's argument, a contingent outcome of the diplomatic miscalculation of all parties rather than the inexorable working-out of Hitler's earlier-fixed grand-strategic plan. The book was attacked across the British academic establishment as effectively exculpatory of Hitler (Hugh Trevor-Roper's January 1961 *Encounter* review was the attack); Taylor maintained that he was simply applying the same diplomatic-historical method to 1933-39 that the post-1919 generation of British historians had applied to the 1914 origins question and that the academic-establishment reaction had been disproportionate. The controversy ran for five years across the academic-historical journals and effectively cost him the Regius Chair of Modern History at Oxford that had been promised to him in late 1957.

The senior public reach of his career was through the BBC. He gave the first set of unscripted, single-camera, lecture-without-notes televised history lectures in May 1957, in a programme called *History Today*, in which he stood in front of a small studio camera and spoke for thirty minutes without script, autocue or visual aid on a historical event of the previous century. The format was, in BBC broadcasting history, the foundational unscripted-talking-head televised-history programme and ran continuously across the next three decades through a series of programmes (*The Russian Revolution*, 1961; *The Twenties*, 1963; *Twentieth-Century Britain*, 1964; *Hitler in Colour*, 1972; *How Wars Begin*, 1977; *How Wars End*, 1985). He married three times (Margaret Adams 1931-1951; Eve Crosland 1951-1974; Eva Haraszti 1976-1990) and had six children. He died of complications from Parkinson's disease at the Westminster Hospital, London on 7 September 1990, eighty-four years old. The Taylor name in the Scottish-side catalogue is the medieval occupational *taillour*, the cutter of cloth, the foundational guild surname of every English and Scottish medieval market town with a tailor's guild; he carried the Birkdale-cotton-merchant variant of it into the popular British televised-history tradition and the standard post-war Oxford historical-monograph register.