A short life of the author
Alan John Percivale Taylor FBA (25 March 1906 – 7 September 1990) was a British historian whose combination of formidable scholarship, brilliant prose style, and instinctive provocativeness made him the most widely read and most frequently argued-about English-language historian of the twentieth century. He was also, through his pioneering television lectures and newspaper columns, the first historian to become a genuine media personality — a role he relished and that his academic colleagues regarded with a mixture of envy and disdain.
Career and Academic Life
Taylor was born in Birkdale, Lancashire, into a prosperous, politically radical family. He attended Bootham School (a Quaker institution in York) and Oriel College, Oxford, before studying modern history in Vienna, where he developed the expertise in Habsburg and Central European history that would inform much of his best work.
He was elected a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1938 and held the position until 1976 — a thirty-eight-year tenure during which he became the most famous historian in Britain while being consistently passed over for the Regius Professorship of History, partly because his colleagues found his journalism undignified and his opinions unreliable.
The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918 (1954)
Taylor’s contribution to the Oxford History of Modern Europe is a masterpiece of diplomatic history — a detailed, lucid, and intellectually commanding account of European great-power politics from the revolutions of 1848 to the end of the First World War. The book’s central argument — that the European state system operated according to its own logic, regardless of the ideologies or personalities of individual statesmen — established Taylor as a diplomatic historian of the first rank.
The Origins of the Second World War (1961)
Taylor’s most controversial book argued that Hitler did not plan the Second World War — that he was an opportunist who exploited the weaknesses of the Western democracies rather than a calculating aggressor who followed a predetermined programme of conquest. The book challenged the orthodox interpretation (established at the Nuremberg trials) that Hitler had a master plan, and it provoked a furious response from historians who accused Taylor of whitewashing Nazi aggression.
Taylor’s argument was more subtle than his critics acknowledged. He did not deny that Hitler was a monster or that Nazi ideology was inherently aggressive; he argued that the diplomatic origins of the war were more complex than a simple story of one man’s criminal ambition. The controversy made the book famous and ensured that it has been debated, taught, and reprinted continuously for over sixty years.
English History, 1914–1945 (1965)
Taylor’s contribution to the Oxford History of England is widely considered the finest single volume of English history written in the twentieth century. It covers the period from the outbreak of the First World War to the Labour landslide of 1945 with a command of political, social, economic, and military history that is breathtaking in its scope and a prose style that is consistently readable, frequently witty, and occasionally outrageous.
The book contains some of Taylor’s most quoted observations: “Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman”; and the book’s final sentence, about the British people in 1945: “They were the only people who went through both wars from beginning to end. Their achievement could be measured by a letter found in a battered British tank at Tobruk: ‘Dear Mum and Dad, This is just to let you know that I am dead.’”
Other Works
Taylor’s prodigious output includes The Habsburg Monarchy, 1809–1918 (1941), a study of the multi-national empire’s disintegration; The Course of German History (1945), a polemical account of German nationalism; Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman (1955); The Trouble Makers (1957), about the tradition of dissent in British foreign policy; and numerous collections of essays and reviews.
Television and Journalism
Taylor was one of the first academics to appear regularly on television. His lectures — delivered to camera without notes, in a style that combined academic authority with journalistic directness — attracted huge audiences and made him a household name. He also wrote regular columns for the Sunday Express and the Daily Herald, reaching millions of readers who would never have opened an academic history book.
Legacy
Taylor’s reputation among academic historians has fluctuated — some regard him as a brilliant stylist who sacrificed accuracy for effect, while others recognise him as a genuinely original thinker whose best work is among the finest historical writing in English. His popular influence is undeniable: he demonstrated that history could be both rigorous and entertaining, and he set the standard for the public historian.
Collecting Taylor
English History, 1914–1945 (1965, Oxford University Press) in first edition with dust jacket is the most sought Taylor collectible. The Origins of the Second World War (1961, Hamish Hamilton) first editions are also collected. Taylor published prolifically and his books are generally available, but signed copies are uncommon.