A.J.P. Taylor

A.J.P. Taylor has written 26 books of history, the latest of which is Politicians, Socialism and Historians. He is a former Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford.

Letter

Other Place

5 November 1981

SIR: Oh dear. Who sent Lords Shelburne and Holland to Christ’s College, Cambridge instead of to Christ Church, Oxford? Was it you? Was it me? Or was it malign fate? At any rate it is wrong.

Having it both ways

Peter Clarke, 27 January 1994

‘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...

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Nobody wants it

Jose Harris, 5 December 1991

‘A cynic? How can I not be when I have spent my life writing history?’ Alan Taylor’s love letters to his Hungarian third wife created a predictably prurient, though transient,...

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Up to Islip

Rosalind Mitchison, 2 August 1984

The examining in my university is over for the year. After the usual haggling – ‘is this worth 69 or 70?’ – with nasty points of principle raised and evaded, the lists...

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Taylorism

Norman Stone, 22 January 1981

‘Like Goering with culture, I reach for my revolver when offered philosophies of history,’ wrote A.J.P. Taylor some years ago, when the ‘What is History’ theme was going...

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