81 Facts About AJP Taylor

Alan John Percivale Taylor was a British historian who specialised in 19th- and 20th-century European diplomacy.

AJP Taylor has mentioned in his reminiscences that his mother was domineering, but his father enjoyed exasperating her by following his own ways.

AJP Taylor had a close relationship with his father, and enjoyed his father's quirkiness.

AJP Taylor himself was recruited into the Communist Party of Great Britain by a friend of the family, the military historian Tom Wintringham, while at Oriel; a member from 1924 to 1926.

AJP Taylor broke with the Party over what he considered to be its ineffective stand during the 1926 General Strike.

Related searches

AJP Taylor was a lecturer in history in the University of Manchester from 1930 to 1938.

AJP Taylor initially lived with his wife in an unfurnished flat on the top floor of an eighteenth-century house called The Limes, at 148 Wilmslow Road, which was set back from the street, opposite the entrance to Didsbury Park, at the southern end of Didsbury village.

AJP Taylor became a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1938, a post he held until 1976.

AJP Taylor was a lecturer in modern history at the University of Oxford from 1938 to 1963.

An important step in AJP Taylor's "rehabilitation" was a festschrift organised in his honour by Martin Gilbert in 1965.

AJP Taylor was honoured with two more festschriften, in 1976 and 1986.

AJP Taylor became friends with Hubert Ripka, the press attache for Benes, who lived in Oxford, and through him, got to know President Benes who lived in London.

In 1943, AJP Taylor wrote his first pamphlet, Czechoslovakia's Place in a Free Europe, explaining his view that Czechoslovakia would after the war serve as a "bridge" between the Western world and the Soviet Union.

Czechoslovakia's Place in a Free Europe began as a lecture AJP Taylor had given at the Czechoslovak Institute in London on 29 April 1943 and at the suggestion of Jan Masaryk was turned into a pamphlet to explain Czechoslovakia's situation to the British people.

In 1979, AJP Taylor resigned in protest from the British Academy over its dismissal of Anthony Blunt, who had been exposed as a Soviet spy.

AJP Taylor married his first wife Margaret Adams in 1931, they had four children together and divorced in 1951.

However, AJP Taylor's speciality was in Central European, British and diplomatic history.

AJP Taylor was especially interested in the Habsburg dynasty and Bismarck.

AJP Taylor's main mentors in this period were the Austrian-born historian Alfred Francis Pribram and the Polish-born historian Sir Lewis Namier.

AJP Taylor controversially argued that the Iron Chancellor had unified Germany more by accident than by design; a theory that contradicted those put forward by the historians Heinrich von Sybel, Leopold von Ranke, and Heinrich von Treitschke in the latter years of the 19th century, and by other historians more recently.

AJP Taylor began his book with the statement that too many people have accepted uncritically what he called the "Nuremberg Thesis", that the Second World War was the result of criminal conspiracy by a small gang comprising Hitler and his associates.

AJP Taylor regarded the "Nuremberg Thesis" as too convenient for too many people and held that it shielded the blame for the war from the leaders of other states, let the German people avoid any responsibility for the war and created a situation where West Germany was a respectable Cold War ally against the Soviets.

AJP Taylor's thesis was that Hitler was not the demoniacal figure of popular imagination but in foreign affairs a normal German leader.

AJP Taylor's argument was that Hitler wished to make Germany the strongest power in Europe but he did not want or plan war.

AJP Taylor portrayed Hitler as a grasping opportunist with no beliefs other than the pursuit of power and anti-Semitism.

Related searches

AJP Taylor argued that Hitler did not possess any sort of programme and his foreign policy was one of drift and seizing chances as they offered themselves.

AJP Taylor did not consider Hitler's anti-Semitism unique: he argued that millions of Germans were just as ferociously anti-Semitic as Hitler and there was no reason to single out Hitler for sharing the beliefs of millions of others.

AJP Taylor was fond of stressing his nonconformist Northern English background and saw himself as part of a grand tradition of radical dissent that he regarded as the real glorious history of England.

In 1964 AJP Taylor wrote the introduction for The Reichstag Fire by the journalist Fritz Tobias.

AJP Taylor thus became the first English-language historian and the first historian after Hans Mommsen to accept the conclusions of the book, that the Nazis had not set the Reichstag on fire in 1933 and that Marinus van der Lubbe had acted alone.

Tobias and AJP Taylor argued that the new Nazi government had been looking for something to increase its share of the vote in the elections of 5 March 1933 so as to activate the Enabling Act, and that van der Lubbe had serendipitously provided it by burning down the Reichstag.

In particular, Tobias and AJP Taylor pointed out that the so-called "secret tunnels" that supposedly gave the Nazis access to the Reichstag were in fact tunnels for water piping.

At the time AJP Taylor was widely attacked by many other historians for endorsing what was considered to be a self-evident perversion of established historical facts.

AJP Taylor wrote significant introductions to British editions of Marx's The Communist Manifesto and of Ten Days that Shook the World, by John Reed.

AJP Taylor had long been an advocate of a treaty with the Soviet Union so British Communists expected him to be friendly.

The introduction AJP Taylor wrote was fairly sympathetic towards the Bolsheviks.

AJP Taylor wrote the introduction for Fighter: The True Story of the Battle of Britain by Len Deighton.

In 1951 AJP Taylor made his first move into mass-market journalism, spending just over a year as a columnist at the tabloid Sunday Pictorial, later renamed the Sunday Mirror.

AJP Taylor's first article was an attack on the stance of the United Nations during the Korean War, in which he argued that the UN was merely a front for American policy.

On 17 March 1942 AJP Taylor made the first of seven appearances on The World at War – Your Questions Answered broadcast by BBC Forces' Radio.

AJP Taylor's appearances began with his role as a panellist on the BBC's In The News from 1950 to 1954.

From 1955 AJP Taylor was a panellist on ITV's rival discussion programme Free Speech, where he remained until the series ended in 1961.

AJP Taylor hosted additional series for ITV in 1964,1966 and 1967.

AJP Taylor had a famous rivalry with the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, with whom he often debated on television.

In public, AJP Taylor declared that he would never have accepted any honour from a government that had "the blood of Suez on its hands".

Related searches

Until 1936, AJP Taylor was an opponent of British rearmament as he felt that a re-armed Britain would ally itself with Germany against the Soviet Union.

However, after 1936, he resigned from the Manchester Peace Council, urged British rearmament in the face of what AJP Taylor considered to be the Nazi menace, and advocated an Anglo-Soviet alliance to contain Germany.

In October 1938, AJP Taylor attracted particular controversy by a speech he gave at a dinner held every October to commemorate a protest by a group of Oxford dons against James II in 1688, an event that was an important prelude to the Glorious Revolution.

AJP Taylor denounced the Munich Agreement and those who supported it, warning the assembled dons that if action were not taken immediately to resist Nazi Germany, then they might all soon be living under the rule of a much greater tyrant than James II.

AJP Taylor's speech was highly contentious, in part because in October 1938 the Munich Agreement was popular with the public even if subsequently it was to be reviled along with the policy of appeasement, and because he used a non-partisan and non-political occasion to make a highly partisan, politically charged attack on government policy.

AJP Taylor felt that the status quo in the West was highly unstable and prone to accidents, and prevented a just and moral international system from coming into being.

AJP Taylor blamed the United States for the Cold War, and in the 1950s and 1960s was one of the leading lights of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

AJP Taylor never visited the United States, despite receiving many invitations.

In 1956 AJP Taylor demonstrated against the Suez War, though not the Soviet crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, which he believed had saved Hungary from a return to the rule of Admiral Miklos Horthy.

AJP Taylor championed Israel, which he saw as a model socialist democracy threatened by reactionary Arab dictatorships.

AJP Taylor was opposed to, and condemned, the US intervention in the Vietnam War.

AJP Taylor was opposed to the British Empire and against Britain's participation in the European Economic Community and NATO.

AJP Taylor claimed the best solution would be for an "armed push" by the Irish nationalists to drive out the one million Ulster Protestants from Ireland.

AJP Taylor cited as a successful precedent the expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia after the Second World War.

Closer to his work as a historian, AJP Taylor espoused less government secrecy and, paradoxically for a staunch leftist, fought for more privately owned television stations.

In regard to government archives, AJP Taylor took part in a successful attempt to lobby the British government to replace the 50-year rule with a 30-year rule.

AJP Taylor was an early champion of what has since been called the Sonderweg interpretation of German history, that German culture and society developed over the centuries in such a way as to make Nazi Germany inevitable.

AJP Taylor, Nazi racial imperialism was a continuation of policies pursued by every German ruler.

AJP Taylor felt that history should be open to all and enjoyed being called the "People's Historian" and the "Everyman's Historian".

AJP Taylor usually favoured an anti-great man theory, history being made for the most part by towering figures of stupidity rather than of genius.

Related searches

AJP Taylor's narratives used irony and humour to entertain as well as inform.

AJP Taylor examined history from odd angles, exposing what he considered to be the pomposities of various historical characters.

AJP Taylor was famed for "Taylorisms": witty, epigrammatic, and sometimes cryptic remarks that were meant to expose what he considered to be the absurdities and paradoxes of modern international relations.

AJP Taylor was careful to puncture any aura of infallibility that historians might have.

AJP Taylor has been credited with coining the term "the Establishment" in a 1953 book review, but this is disputed.

In 1967, AJP Taylor wrote an article for the Sunday Express in which he argued that speed limits had made absolutely no positive difference to road safety and that "on the contrary, [speed limits] tend to increase the risks and dangers".

The Council eventually rejected the complaint and ruled that "while Mr AJP Taylor's views are controversial, he has an unchallengeable right to express them".

In particular, Trevor-Roper criticised AJP Taylor's argument that the Hossbach Memorandum of 1937 was a meaningless document because none of the scenarios outlined in the Memorandum as the prerequisite for war, such as the Spanish Civil War leading to a war between Italy and France in the Mediterranean, or civil war breaking out in France, occurred.

However, in the last edition of the book, AJP Taylor argues that the significant parts, if not the whole, of the memorandum are in fact fabrications.

Rowse, who had once been a close friend of AJP Taylor's, attacked him with an intensity and vehemence that was second only to Trevor-Roper's.

AJP Taylor was angered by some of the criticism, especially the implication that he had set out to exonerate Hitler, writing that "to the best of my recollection, those who now display indignation against me were not active [against appeasement] on the public platform".

AJP Taylor drew a picture of Benito Mussolini as a great showman but an inept leader with no beliefs.

AJP Taylor argued that Mussolini was sincere when he helped forge the Stresa Front with Britain and France to resist any German challenge to the status quo in Europe and that only the League of Nations sanctions imposed on Fascist Italy for Italian invasion of Ethiopia drove Mussolini into an alliance with Nazi Germany.

AJP Taylor has been criticised for promoting the La decadence view of the French Third Republic.

AJP Taylor was badly injured in 1984 when he was run over by a car while crossing Old Compton Street in London.

AJP Taylor had, with considerable difficulty, memorised a short speech, which he delivered in a manner that managed to hide the fact that his memory and mind had been permanently damaged by Parkinson's disease.