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“... leader. In reply to the argument that in 1931 Ramsay MacDonald had to think of the nation, A.J.P. Taylor once said that he shouldn’t have been thinking of the country, he should have been thinking of the Labour Party. Blair, too, should have been thinking of the Labour Party. What on earth did he imagine was going to happen in those seats where the Muslim ...”

“... Hope and Glory’. Few even sang ‘England Arise’. England had risen all the same. Thus A.J.P. Taylor, in his English History 1914-1945, of 1965. Who can believe it now, either as an idea of England, or as a starting piece for a collection of English writings from the early 1950s? And who can even remember ‘England Arise’? Who recalls who wrote it, or ...”

“... The term ‘Establishment’, in its secular modern sense, seems to have originated with A.J.P. Taylor in 1953. He stretched its provenance from the Established Church to cover the governing classes in general. What Henry Fairlie did two years later in a famous article in the Spectator was to gloss the term as identifying a particular sort of informal power ...”

“... is coherent and strongly argued. Mazower is not afraid of sweeping statements that recall A.J.P. Taylor: ‘the Soviet Union was the Habsburg Empire’s real heir, just as Hitler’s New Order was its ultimate rejection.’ Or: ‘Europeans accept democracy because they no longer believe in politics.’ However, there is almost always a nuanced, balancing ...”

“... to the experience of the last 12 years. In his conclusion, Holland cites a phrase which A.J.P. Taylor applied to India and Pakistan and suggests that Northern Ireland is a ‘non-historical state’. Its population exists and suffers in the kind of ahistorical vacuum which Eliot imagines in ‘Little Gidding’:     A people without history Is not ...”

“... what seemed to be the likely event of Balkanisation – was, who would gain control of it? A.J.P. Taylor gave a pithy assessment of the Congress of Berlin in The Struggle for Mastery in Europe: ‘Macedonia and Bosnia, the two great achievements of the Congress, both contained the seeds of future disaster. The Macedonian Question haunted European diplomacy ...”

“... Pound and Geoffrey Harmsworth’s enormous official biography was published. Reviewing it, A.J.P. Taylor set out a line which wise commentators have followed ever since. He appreciated Northcliffe’s unique contribution to the newspaper industry and his brilliance as a businessman, but punctured the liberal intelligentsia’s claim that he had poisoned ...”

“... structural analysis of 18th-century politics. (Morgan approvingly quotes Foot’s friend A.J.P. Taylor criticising Namier for ‘taking the mind out of history’ without allowing for the fact that what Taylor found hard to bear was knowing that Namier had changed the study of political history for ever, in a way he ...”

“... an active undergraduate Communist at Oxford, was closely associated in politics with A.J.P. Taylor, who himself travelled in Russia in the 1920s, where he met the Bolshevik leader Kirov. During the war, Taylor was active in the Second Front Now movement, and was also a ‘peace’ agitator in the CND movement. Though ...”

“... out of oddments, to fill in the gaps. Historians write ‘for the joy of creation’, A.J.P. Taylor once said. And yet the effect of history’s formalisation as a subject (which has proceeded apace since Taylor’s time) has been to draw an increasingly severe distinction between the real thing ...”

“... 1900 and 1913 was more than double the number killed during the First World War. Like A.J.P. Taylor, graphs and tables have their paradoxes. The Cambridge History plainly owes as much to historical method as to social theory. It is rich in the kind of descriptive detail which can only come from years of grubbing about in the archives. But all this ...”

“... where, famously, he became a protégé of Beaverbrook for whom, like his great friend A.J.P. Taylor, he was to have an abiding affection. The Standard then was no mere rag: Foot was to recruit Jon Kimche, Arthur Koestler and Isaac Deutscher to write for it, and it provided Foot with a secure and happy base. Over the years Beaverbrook showered him with ...”

“... Even many who defended it expected it to disappear within a generation. But it didn’t. A.J.P. Taylor once remarked that 1848 was the moment when German history reached its turning-point, and failed to turn. This is more false than true, but it fits the history of the death penalty – up to a point. Capital punishment was restored across most of Germany ...”

“... with the book that made Mack Smith famous in Italy. When Cavour and Garibaldi appeared, A.J.P. Taylor said of it, ‘With brilliant, though well-founded perversity, Mr Mack Smith turns things upside down,’ and that was certainly part of the reason for its impact. The traditional view of the main actors in the drama of the Italian unification movement had ...”

“... of the suspicion that Churchill often drank pretty hard, and why shouldn’t he have done? A.J.P. Taylor refers to a letter from Churchill to Beaverbrook as ‘brusque’. Gilbert queries whether the description is just, though the letter looks brusque enough to this reviewer. On Gilbert’s behalf it should be urged that there are many black legends about ...”