Having it both ways

Peter Clarke

• A.J.P. Taylor: A Biography by Adam Sisman
  Sinclair-Stevenson, 468 pp, £18.99, January 1994, ISBN 1 85619 210 5
• A.J.P. Taylor: The Traitor within the Gates by Robert Cole
  Macmillan, 285 pp, £40.00, November 1993, ISBN 0 333 59273 5
• From Napoleon to the Second International: International Essays on the 19th Century by A.J.P. Taylor, edited by Chris Wrigley
  Hamish Hamilton, 426 pp, £25.00, November 1993, ISBN 0 02 411344 1

‘Writing history is like W.C. Fields juggling,’ was how he put it. ‘It looks easy until you try to do it.’ In 1977, when this comment was first published, some younger readers may have asked themselves: W.C. Who? Typically, this was not a forced, would-be trendy allusion to current vogues of popular culture in the electronic media but an authentically personal image, implicitly framed in nostalgia. Nothing odd about that from an Oxford don now past his seventieth birthday, fiddling with his invariable bow tie, while steadily regarding the follies of the world with an unnervingly non-committal gaze through old-fashioned spectacles. Yet this was also the first telly-don, instantly recognised by a wider public than any historian before or since; a man who peddled his idiosyncratic views down-market through the columns of the popular press; the author of controversial works which made news as well as money. No one asked A.J.P. Who?