The Oxford historian so popular his lectures were moved to 8:30 a.m.
A. J. P. Taylor packed Oxford lecture halls so tightly that he was scheduled at half past eight in the morning to thin the crowds. Millions more knew him from television, and Richard Overy later called him the Macaulay of our age. Yet Oxford quietly dropped his lectureship after one explosive book.
Alan John Percivale Taylor was born on 25 March 1906 in Birkdale, Southport, the only child of a cotton merchant and a schoolmistress. His prosperous parents were left-wing pacifists who objected to the First World War so strongly that they sent their boy to Quaker schools, Bootham in York among them, as a form of protest. At Oriel College, Oxford, which he entered in 1924, a family friend, the military historian Tom Wintringham, signed him up for the Communist Party. Taylor quit in 1926, disgusted by its feeble showing during the General Strike, and stayed a Labour member for over six decades.
After a first-class degree in 1927 he went to Vienna intending to trace how Chartism affected the upheavals of 1848. That plan proved unworkable, so he turned to Italian unification, and his debut book on the subject appeared in 1934. He taught at Manchester from 1930 to 1938, then held a Magdalen fellowship until 1976. Two émigré mentors shaped him: Alfred Francis Pribram, who admired the Habsburgs, and Lewis Namier, who did not. By 1941, when his study of the Habsburg monarchy came out, Namier's sceptical view had won.
The Second World War drew him into politics. He served in the Home Guard, befriended the exiled Czechoslovak president Edvard Beneš and the Hungarian Mihály Károlyi, and in 1943 wrote a pamphlet casting postwar Czechoslovakia as a bridge between the West and Moscow. The Political Warfare Executive employed him as a Central Europe specialist, and he pressed Britain to recognise Tito's Partisans in Yugoslavia.
Trouble arrived in 1964, when the university declined to renew his lectureship in the wake of the storm over The Origins of the Second World War; he kept his college post and began teaching in London. Former students answered with a festschrift organised by Martin Gilbert in 1965, followed by two more in 1976 and 1986, an almost unheard-of tribute. In 1979 he walked out of the British Academy after it expelled the exposed Soviet spy Anthony Blunt, insisting that only scholarship should count. He died on 7 September 1990, and a 2011 History Today poll ranked him fourth among historians of the preceding sixty years.
Source: A. J. P. Taylor
