A. J. P. Taylor

Alan John Percivale Taylor (25 March 1906 – 7 September 1990) was a British historian, journalist, broadcaster and scholar. His approachably written and sometimes contentiously revisionist studies of 19th and early 20th-century subjects brought academic history to a new audience.

• A revolution cannot be judged by the ordinary standards of academic morality.
  • Review of a biography of Maximilien Robespierre in the Manchester Guardian (14 January 1936), quoted in Adam Sisman, A. J. P. Taylor: A Biography (1994; 1995), p. 104

• Injustice occurs in free states as in despotic states; and the attempt to right the wrong is as unpopular and dangerous in the one as in the other – as the case of Zola shows. The difference between free and unfree countries is that in the free country there are always men who will champion the unpopular cause at whatever the cost. It is this stage army of the good, with its slightly ridiculous reappearances which alone keeps our liberties alive. The Dreyfus case, at its outset, was a disgrace for France; but because of the struggles of a small minority it ended in bringing France more glory than all the campaigns of Napoleon.
  • Review of Pierre Dreyfus's biography of Alfred Dreyfus in the Manchester Guardian (7 May 1937), quoted in Chris Wrigley, A.J.P. Taylor: A Complete Annotated Bibliography and Guide to His Historical and Other Writings (1980), p. 6

• The average Englishman was ashamed of the British Empire and believed (quite wrongly) that it had been acquired in some wicked fashion... This sense of sin placed British governments at a disadvantage in their negotiations with Germany: they were convinced of the justice of German grievances even before the grievances were expressed. British governments had spent most of the nineteenth century trying to prevent the growth of the British Empire, and still it had grown; German governments had done their utmost to encourage colonial enterprise, and yet their empire was a failure; clearly it was the fault of British governments and they must put it right... there they stood, ears anxiously cocked for the next German complaint. Moreover, British politicians have always been peculiarly sensitive to the charge of "unfriendliness" towards other politicians or other countries... Granville's letters to Herbert Bismarck—my dear fellow, what can be wrong?—are not unique in the record of British policy, and if the dear fellow insists on this or that as the price of renewing eternal friendship, of course he must have it.
  • Germany's First Bid for Colonies, 1884–1885: A Move in Bismarck's European Policy (1938), pp. 14-15

• Anglo-German relations between 1884 and 1914 abound in these private letters and unofficial visits, culminating in another British surrender and renewed protestations of friendship. But in the last years before 1914 British politicians were beginning to realise that only one thing could end these quarrels and secure German friendship for ever—the adoption of a policy which would give the Germans what they called security, but what to others appeared as German hegemony over the entire continent of Europe. Even Gladstone and Granville would have been unwilling to buy German friendship at this price.
  • Germany's First Bid for Colonies, 1884–1885: A Move in Bismarck's European Policy (1938), p. 15

• The only danger to history today is that historians are sometimes too modest and try to find excuses for their task. It is safer as well as sounder to be confident. Men write history for the same reason that they write poetry, study the properties of numbers, or play football—for the joy of creation; men read history for the same reason that they listen to music or watch cricket—for the joy of appreciation. Once abandon that firm ground, once plead that history has a "message" or that history has a "social responsibility" (to produce good Marxists or good Imperialists or good citizens) and there is no logical escape from the censor and the Index, the O.G.P.U. and the Gestapo.
  • 'The Historian', The Manchester Guardian (5 August 1938), quoted in Chris Wrigley, A.J.P. Taylor: A Complete Annotated Bibliography and Guide to His Historical and Other Writings (1980), p. 265

• The object of policy is not to prove one's moral worth, but to succeed.
  • Time and Tide (23 May 1942), quoted in Chris Wrigley, A.J.P. Taylor: A Complete Annotated Bibliography and Guide to His Historical and Other Writings (1980), p. 284

• Quakerism has always been in danger of smugness, and is redeemed from it only by an obstinate radicalism.
  • Review of Viscount Templewood's Nine Troubled Years in the Manchester Guardian (13 November 1954), quoted in Chris Wrigley, A.J.P. Taylor: A Complete Annotated Bibliography and Guide to His Historical and Other Writings (1980), p. 372

• In international affairs there was nothing wrong with Hitler except that he was a German.
  • Taylor, A. J. P. (1996). "Second Thoughts". The Origins Of The Second World War (reprint ed.). New York: Simon and Schuster. p. xxviii. ISBN 9780684829470. Retrieved on 26 June 2024. "[Hitler] aimed to make Germany the dominant Power in Europe and maybe, more remotely, in the world. Other Powers have pursued similar aims, and still do. Other Powers seek to defend their vital interests by force of arms. In international affairs there was nothing wrong with Hitler except that he was a German." 

• A racing tipster who only reached Hitler's level of accuracy would not do well for his clients.
  • The Origins of the Second World War ([1961] 1962), Ch. 7, p. 134

• The First World War had begun — imposed on the statesmen of Europe by railway timetables. It was an unexpected climax to the railway age.
  • The First World War ([1963] 1970) p. 20

• In 1917 European history, in the old sense, came to an end. World history began. It was the year of Lenin and Woodrow Wilson, both of whom repudiated the traditional standards of political behaviour. Both preached Utopia, Heaven on Earth. It was the moment of birth for our contemporary world.
  • The First World War ([1963] 1970) p. 165

• Like most of those who study history, he learned from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones.
  • Referring to Napoleon III, in "Mistaken Lessons from the Past", The Listener (6 June 1963)

• In the second World war the British people came of age. This was a people's war. Not only were their needs considered. They themselves wanted to win. Future historians may see the war as a last struggle for the European balance of power or for the maintenance of Empire. This was not how it appeared to those who lived through it. The British people had set out to destroy Hitler and National Socialism—"Victory at all costs". They succeeded. No English soldier who rode with the tanks into liberated Belgium or saw the German murder camps at Dachau or Buchenwald could doubt that the war had been a noble crusade. The British were the only people who went through both world wars from beginning to end. Yet they remained a peaceful and civilized people, tolerant, patient, and generous. Traditional values lost much of their force. Other values took their place. Imperial greatness was on the way out; the welfare state was on the way in. The British empire declined; the condition of the people improved. Few now sang "Land of Hope and Glory". Few even sang "England Arise". England had risen all the same.
  • English History 1914–1945 (1965), p. 600

• History gets thicker as it approaches recent times: more people, more events, and more books written about them. More evidence is preserved, often, one is tempted to say, too much. Decay and destruction have hardly begun their beneficent work.
  • English History 1914 – 1945 ([1965] 1975), "Revised Bibliography", p. 729

• Taylor's Law states: "The Foreign Office knows no secrets."
  • English History 1914 – 1945 ([1965] 1975), "Revised Bibliography", p. 730

• The greatest problem about old age is the fear that it may go on too long.
  • An Old Man's Diary ([1981] 1984) p. 39

• I was a narrative historian, believing more and more as I matured that the first function of the historian was to answer the child's question, "What happened next?"
  • A Personal History ([1983] 1984) p. 301

• Why should knowledge of where I came from tell me where I am going to?
  • 'Moving with the Times', The Observer, 22 October 1961

Comprises the text of the Ford Lectures on English History (1956); quotations are cited from the 1985 edition, ISBN 0140225757

• Every historian loves the past or should do. If not, he has mistaken his vocation; but it is a short step from loving the past to regretting that it has ever changed. Conservatism is our greatest trade-risk; and we run psychoanalysts close in the belief that the only "normal" people are those who cause no trouble either to themselves or anybody else.
  • "The Radical Tradition: Fox, Paine, and Cobbett", p. 14

• Conformity may give you a quiet life; it may even bring you to a University Chair. But all change in history, all advance, comes from the nonconformists. If there had been no trouble-makers, no Dissenters, we should still be living in caves.
  • "The Radical Tradition: Fox, Paine, and Cobbett", p. 14

• In my opinion we learn nothing from history except the infinite variety of men’s behaviour. We study it, as we listen to music or read poetry, for pleasure, not for instruction
  • "The Radical Tradition: Fox, Paine, and Cobbett", p. 23.

• The present enables us to understand the past, not the other way round.
  • "The Radical Tradition: Fox, Paine, and Cobbett", p. 24.

• The worker is by nature less imaginative, more level-headed than the capitalist. This is what prevents his becoming one. He is content with small gains. Trade Union officials think about the petty cash; the employer speculates in millions. You can see the difference in their representative institutions. There is no scheme too wild, no rumour too absurd, to be without repercussions on the Stock Exchange. The public house is the home of common sense.
  • "Dissenting Rivals: Urquhart and Cobden", p. 55

• American statesmen might like some Europeans more than others and even detect quaint resemblances to their own outlook; but they no more committed themselves to a particular group or country than a nineteenth-century missionary committed himself to the African tribe in which he happened to find himself.
  • "The Great War: The Triumph of E. D. Morel", p. 157

• The fine line, it seems to me, goes thus: there has to be a plausibility in your story. A history book—assuming its facts are correct—stands or falls by the conviction with which it tells its story. If it rings true, to an intelligent, informed reader, then it is a good history book. If it rings false, then it’s not good history, even if it’s well written by a great historian on the basis of sound scholarship.
  The best-known example of the latter was A. J. P. Taylor's Origins of the Second World War. It is a beautifully written tract, the work of a consummate diplomatic historian: an expert in the relevant documents, a competent linguist and highly intelligent. At first sight, all of the constituent parts of a good history book were present. So what was missing? The answer is hard to pin down. Perhaps the issue is one of taste. To claim—as Taylor did—that Hitler was not responsible for World War II is absurdly counterintuitive. However subtly expressed, the argument is so implausible as to be poor history.
  • Tony Judt, in Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century (2012), Chap. 7 : Unities and Fragments: European Historian

• I picked up Alan Taylor at the Athenaeum and walked with him along the Strand and Fleet Street. Taxed him with being a fellow-traveller and asked him what he thought he was getting at. He was slightly disconcerted, I fancy, but said that he quite recognised the impracticability of the position of the Socialist who believes in working with the Communists, but that he prefers this position, even so, to working with Anti-Communists. I said it seemed to me quite insane. He is now a Fellow of Magdalen, Oxford and, altogether, very well dug into the economic system which he wants to destroy.
  • Malcolm Muggeridge, diary entry (13 April 1948), quoted in Like It Was: The Diaries of Malcolm Muggeridge, ed. John Bright-Holmes (1981), p. 267

• The book will also suggest that students of world politics should draw for their rules of interpretation rather less on Marx and rather more on Machiavelli.
  • W. K. H., review of A. J. P. Taylor, Germany's First Bid for Colonies, 1884–1885: A Move in Bismarck's European Policy in International Affairs, Vol. 17, No. 4 (July – August 1938), p. 558

Wikipedia has an article about:

A. J. P. Taylor

• A. J. P. Taylor
• Economic Imperialism by A. J. P. Taylor
• AJP Taylor's Railroad Timetable Theory
• The Taylor Thesis
• Hitler, Stresemann and the Discontinuity of German Foreign Policy
• The Origins of the Second World War Reflections on Three Approaches to the Problem
• Review of AJP Taylor: Radical Historian of Europe by Tristram Hunt in The Guardian
• Taylor author page and archive at The London Review of Books