A. J. P. Taylor

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A. J. P. Taylor bigraphy, stories - Historian

A. J. P. Taylor : biography

25 March 1906 – 07 September 1990

Alan John Percivale Taylor, FBA (25 March 1906 – 7 September 1990) was a British historian who specialised in 19th- and 20th-century European diplomacy. Both a journalist and a broadcaster, he became well known to millions through his television lectures. His combination of academic rigour and popular appeal led the historian Richard Overy to describe him as "the Macaulay of our age".

Life

Early life

Taylor was born in 1906 in Birkdale near Southport, which was then part of Lancashire. His wealthy parents held left-wing views, which he inherited. Both his parents were pacifists who vocally opposed the First World War, and sent their son to Quaker schools as a way of protesting against the war. He was educated at various Quaker schools including Bootham School in York. Geoffrey Barraclough, a contemporary at Bootham, remembered Taylor as "a most arresting, stimulating, vital personality, violently anti-bourgeois and anti-Christian". Initially he had an interest in archaeology, primarily focused on churches in northern England. His interest in archaeology led to a strong interest in history. In 1924, he went to Oriel College, Oxford, to study modern history.

In the 1920s, Taylor’s mother, Constance, was a member of the Comintern while one of his uncles was a founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Constance was a suffragette, feminist, and advocate of free love who practised her teachings via a string of extramarital affairs, most notably with Henry Sara, a communist who in many ways became Taylor’s surrogate father. Taylor himself was recruited into the Communist Party of Great Britain by a friend of the family, the military historian Tom Wintringham, while at Oriel; a member from 1924 to 1926, he broke with the Party over what he considered to be its ineffective stand during the 1926 General Strike. After leaving, he was an ardent supporter of the Labour Party for the rest of his life, remaining a member for over sixty years. Despite his break with the Communist Party, he visited the Soviet Union in 1925, and again in 1934, and was much impressed on both visits.

Academic career

Taylor graduated from Oxford in 1927. After working briefly as a legal clerk, he began his post-graduate work, going to Vienna to study the impact of the Chartist movement on the Revolution of 1848. When this topic turned out not to be feasible, he switched to studying the question of Italian unification over a two-year period. This resulted in his first book, The Italian Problem in European Diplomacy, 1847–49 published in 1934.

Manchester tears

Taylor lectured in history at the University of Manchester from 1930 to 1938. He came with his wife to live firstly in a furnished flat (before they could get a furnished one)at the top floor of an eighteenth-century house opposite the entrance to Didsbury Park called The Limes at 148 Wilmslow Road at the southern end of Didsbury village and set back from the street

He became a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1938, a post he held until 1976. He also lectured in modern history at Oxford from 1938 to 1963. At Oxford he was such an extraordinarily popular speaker he had to give his lectures at 8:30 a.m. to avoid the room becoming over-crowded.

In 1964, when Oxford refused to renew his term as lecturer in the aftermath of the controversy occasioned by The Origins of the Second World War, he became a lecturer at the Institute of Historical Research in London, University College London, and the Polytechnic of North London.

An important step in Taylor’s "rehabilitation" was a festschrift organised in his honour by Martin Gilbert in 1965. He was honoured with two more festschriften, in 1976 and 1986. The festschriften were testaments to his popularity with his former students, as receiving even a single festschrift is considered to be an extraordinary and rare honour.

Second World War

During the Second World War, Taylor served in the Home Guard and befriended émigré statesmen from Eastern Europe, such as the former Hungarian President Count Mihály Károlyi and the Czechoslovak President Dr. Edvard Beneš. These friendships helped to enhance his understanding of the region. His friendship with Beneš and Károlyi may help explain his friendly portrayal of them, in particular Károlyi, whom Taylor portrayed as a saintly figure. Taylor was later to claim proudly that he advised Beneš to embark upon the expulsion of the entire German population of Czechoslovakia after the war. During the same period, Taylor was employed by the Political Warfare Executive as an expert on Central Europe and frequently spoke on the radio and at various public meetings. During the war, he lobbied for British recognition of Josip Broz Tito’s Partisans as the legitimate government of Yugoslavia.