London Review of Books

Fighting off the Boche

Robert Kee

11 October 1990

“... been told, is a different country and they do things differently there, but not for me, not where Alan Taylor is concerned. He had a most wonderfully consistent personality. That look of amused, quizzical discernment which is even in the photographs his third wife Eva took of him in the sunshine on the last day of his life was much the same as that which ...”

Wizard of Ox

Paul Addison

8 November 1990

“... Many tributes have been paid to Alan Taylor, including some by old and close friends who knew him very much better than I did. My excuse for adding one more piece is that I would like to explain something of what he meant to younger historians who came within his orbit. Perhaps I shall end up speaking only for myself, but at any rate I can speak from experience as one of his pupils ...”

Enter Hamilton

Eric Foner

5 October 2016

American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804
by Alan Taylor.
Norton, 704 pp., £30, November 2016, 978 0 393 08281 4Show More

“... from the Ku Klux Klan and kindred groups. Where does all this originate? In American Revolutions, Alan Taylor offers a surprising answer: the struggle for independence itself. Racism, violence, scurrilous attacks on opponents: all, he argues, were part of American political culture from the outset. Taylor breaks ...”

Misbehavin’

Susannah Clapp

23 July 1987

A Life with Alan: The Diary of A.J.P. Taylor’s Wife, Eva, from 1978 to 1985
by Eva Haraszti Taylor.
Hamish Hamilton, 250 pp., £14.95, June 1987, 0 241 12118 3Show More

The Painted Banquet: My Life and Loves
by Jocelyn Rickards.
Weidenfeld, 172 pp., £14.95, May 1987, 0 297 79119 2Show More

The Beaverbrook Girl
by Janet Aitken Kidd.
Collins, 240 pp., £12.95, May 1987, 0 00 217602 5Show More

“... When the London Review of Books began to run a Diary in 1982, A.J.P. Taylor was one of its authors. He always delivered to an exact length, well before the deadline, and often in person. A new editorial assistant, handed copy by the small seventy-five-year-old in a deerstalker who had scaled the steep stairs to our earlier offices, decided he must be a Mercury messenger ...”

K.B. McFarlane is remembered by Alan Bennett, his former student, and the life of a Forties Oxford don is evoked in two of his letters

Alan Bennett

4 September 1997

“... McFarlane has figured in accounts of the period chiefly as the colleague and opponent of A.J.P. Taylor with whom he shared the history teaching at Magdalen. Taylor achieved the kind of fame Bruce wanted none of, but, unlike Taylor, Bruce managed without effort to acquire a body of ...”

In the Hands of the Cannibals

Neal Ascherson

20 February 1997

Europe: A History
by Norman Davies.
Oxford, 1365 pp., £25, October 1996, 0 19 820171 0Show More

“... 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 ...”

Diary

R.W. Johnson: Alan Taylor, Oxford Don

8 May 1986

“... College, Oxford, the fact that my vote at college meetings counted the same as that of A.J.P. Taylor seemed to me, as it still does, a glorious democratic quirk of the Oxford collegiate system. I was just 26 and the youngest fellow; he was probably the most famous historian in the world. I was not long to think of him by his initials, for ...”

Heat-Seeking

Susan Pedersen: A.J.P. Taylor

10 May 2007

A.J.P. Taylor: Radical Historian of Europe
by Chris Wrigley.
Tauris, 439 pp., £25, August 2006, 1 86064 286 1Show More

“... This is the third full biography of A.J.P. Taylor to appear since his death in 1990. I find this fact almost more interesting than anything in the biographies themselves. For more than two decades after the war Taylor was, very nearly, the public face of the historical profession in Britain, delivering his pugnacious, often revisionist, views on television and radio, in more than two dozen books and hundreds of newspaper columns, and in countless lectures to Oxford undergraduates and the history-minded public ...”

Hit and Muss

John Campbell

23 January 1986

David Low
by Colin Seymour-Ure and Jim Schoff.
Secker, 180 pp., £9.95, October 1985, 9780436447556Show More

“... of practically every political figure of the 20th century, generously supplemented by A.J.P. Taylor’s accumulated review copies. From time to time there would emerge from his tiny office in the thin end of the wedge-shaped building, behind the Sickert portrait of Beaverbrook and the cases of Lloyd George memorabilia, the high priest ...”

Going Flat Out, National Front and All

Ian Hamilton: Watch your mouth!

14 December 2000

Diaries: Into Politics
by Alan Clark.
Weidenfeld, 389 pp., £20, October 2000, 0 297 64402 5Show More

The Assassin’s Cloak: An Anthology of the World’s Greatest Diarists
edited by Irene Taylor and Alan Taylor.
Canongate, 684 pp., £25, November 2000, 0 86241 920 4Show More

The Journals of Woodrow Wyatt. Vol. III: From Major to Blair
edited by Sarah Curtis.
Macmillan, 823 pp., £25, November 2000, 9780333774069Show More

“... before – and with more pleasure to her then I think in all the time of our marriage before’.) Alan Clark’s Diaries 1983-91, published a few years ago, were applauded for their beastly candour but Clark was nowhere near as winningly ingenuous as Pepys. Mrs Clark was generally pitied at the time for having to put up with such a brute but on the whole she ...”

Having it both ways

Peter Clarke

27 January 1994

A.J.P. Taylor: A Biography
by Adam Sisman.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 468 pp., £18.99, January 1994, 1 85619 210 5Show More

A.J.P. Taylor: The Traitor within the Gates
by Robert Cole.
Macmillan, 285 pp., £40, November 1993, 0 333 59273 5Show More

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, November 1993, 0 241 13444 7Show More

“... as well as money. No one asked A.J.P. Who? Such tensions are worth exploring; and the more A.J.P. Taylor’s life is explored, the more tensions are disclosed. When he wrote his autobiography, he proposed to call it ‘An Uninteresting Story’, doubtless suspecting that his publishers would veto this proposal (as they duly did). Whatever else it was, the ...”

Nobody wants it

José Harris

5 December 1991

Letters to Eva, 1969-1983
by A.J.P. Taylor, edited by Eva Haraszti Taylor.
Century, 486 pp., £20, June 1991, 0 7126 4634 5Show More

“... 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 ...”

Diary

John Bayley: Serious Novels

10 November 1994

“... seemed to inspire some of the best novels, notably James Kelman’s How late it was, how late, Alan Hollinghurst’s The Folding Star, Anita Brookner’s A Private View, Candia McWilliam’s Debatable Land. A heterogeneous assortment, but in each case the subject and its world had found the author, not the other way round. Kelman’s tremulously alcoholic ...”

Letters to an Editor – written by his contributor, A.J.P. Taylor, to Kingsley Martin of the ‘New Statesman’ at various times from 1951 to 1964

A.J.P. Taylor

10 May 1990

“... Yours ever, Alan Dear Kingsley, You are quite right about Aberdeen, and I was careless about him. I ought to have made his view clearer, and so incidentally ought Temperley at the end of his book on the Crimea. I think on the whole that I am right about Bright. He had a good ...”

Snob Cuts

Rosemary Hill: Modern Snobbery

3 November 2016

“... The bookseller was a snob about snobbery and thought it was vulgar to talk about class. D.J. Taylor is perhaps a literary snob for Cooper gets no mention in his much less enjoyable The New Book of Snobs: A Definitive Guide to Modern Snobbery (Little, Brown, £16.99). His first mistake is to attempt a definition rather than rely on examples. He suggests ...”

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