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“... later, repeatedly ‘brought party disunion and electoral defeat’ (in the words of A.J.P. Taylor, who was to become the Beaver’s favourite historian). In Taylor’s definition, ‘Imperial Preference … meant in practice British tariffs on foreign food, while foodstuffs from the Dominions came in free.’ There ...”

“... than several Ruritanian dynasties with an equally grubby record. Lord Vansittart and A.J.P. Taylor can rest easily in their graves. It has proved more difficult to kill off Prussia in the mind. Post-war historians in the Federal Republic were soon busy rehabilitating the Borussian state. Influential figures like Gerhard Ritter insisted that the main ...”

“... Macmillan’s Lord Rockingham. Namier affected to despise all ideological ‘isms’ and A.J.P. Taylor spoke of his having taken the mind out of history. Professor Colley not only puts it back in but shows Namier’s thinking to be dominated by Marx and Freud. These towering influences, together with Vilfredo Pareto, Graham Wallas and Charles Beard, all ...”

“... that anyone now remembers, but even that has eluded Brown, who attributes the phrase to A.J.P. Taylor. This is a mistake a competent ghost-writer might have avoided. But our new prime minister should be able to fend off any doubts about authorship. Cavell ‘sought to replicate those exacting standards and instil an equally uncompromising dedication to ...”

“... 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, stir when they were published earlier this year. Their more lasting interest may lie in the light that they throw upon Taylor the practising historian, musing to a fellow historian about the mysteries of his craft ...”

“... all others to awe-struck silence. On domestic politics Lord Beaverbrook and his acolyte A.J.P. Taylor gave us plenty to be going on with, even before younger specialists like Cameron Hazlehurst began to dissect the minutiae of Cabinet crises. Arthur Marwick boldly opened up the whole question of war and social change. Recently a number of younger ...”

“... call-to-arms for all makers of literary lives, and Adam Sisman, previously a biographer of A.J.P. Taylor, has taken on a genuine task, a presumptuous task indeed, to write a biography of the biography, in the hope of casting light on the very real subject of how to make a biographical subject real. His book is successful in ways that might draw attention to ...”

“... And similarly the wide readership and powerful television presence of historians such as A.J.P. Taylor, E.P. Thompson, Asa Briggs, and Cannadine himself, suggest that although history may no longer define communal national consciousness it has not lost its capacity to engage and entertain a large mass of individuals. Cannadine admits that Trevelyan was ...”

“... the first importance. But it is a very considerable sociological problem. I an sorry that A.J.P. Taylor, who has ventured to express himself as puzzled by it, is therefore judged by Mr Fussell to be ‘dim-witted’ – one of Orwell’s expressions. Mr Fussell, who is quite up-to-date, adds ‘wet’ off his own ...”

“... before the First World War, by 1920 he had become an ‘international man’. In the 1950s, A.J.P. Taylor retrospectively enlisted him as a member of CND, but a decade later he was being pulled in the opposite direction by the free marketeers of the Mont Pélérin Society in Europe and the Foundation for Economic Education in the US. This volume of letters ...”

“... Simpson divorced Mr Simpson for his own good. The best method, surely, is the one used by A.J.P. Taylor in his editorial foreword to Beaverbrook’s book: he feels that Mrs Simpson was unfairly blamed; he says so and says why, briefly. Lady Mosley’s other aim is ‘to try and discover something about the woman who inspired such a deep and lasting love and ...”

“... erzwungene Krieg (a war forced on Germany) to explain Nazi aggression. In Germany itself, A.J.P. Taylor has found few if any disciples. But even if a shadow of doubt hung over the question of Germany’s responsibility for the war, there was none whatever about her conduct of it. Goering and his co-defendants at the Nuremberg Trials made hay of the highly ...”

“... an exaggerated relish that suggests insecurity. In this, he was unlike the much tougher A.J.P. Taylor, who came to Oxford from middle-class Lancashire and was able to view the place with affectionate detachment. Taylor got on sturdily with his work. Trevor-Roper let himself be drawn into energy-sapping college ...”

“... Most of its 27 biographies originated as book reviews and – in the tradition set by A.J.P. Taylor – they reappear without footnotes or full scholarly apparatus, though with a substantial ‘Select Bibliography’. The newcomer gets double value from a book of this kind, for it combines surveying the abundant recently-published material on ...”

“... provincialism of conventional Western history writing. (Another model and tutor, the late A.J.P. Taylor, took a different line, treating the smaller nations of Eastern Europe with impatient contempt.) But he is the first to offer the general public a convincing alternative. It was high time. The old versions were already losing credibility. As Davies ...”