AJP Taylor: Radical Historian of Europe
by Chris Wrigley
256pp, IB Tauris, £25
"I wondered whether you ever had an opening for a lively talker on current affairs in television. As you know, I can do very nicely in impromptu discussion; and if you are ever thinking of this sort of thing, I'd be grateful if you'd think of me. I realise it is a new trade, but I'm not too old to learn it." This letter from AJP Taylor - written in the hope of joining the panel show In the News - seems to embody everything we now know about the first "TV don". It is ambitious, self-regarding and typical of Taylor's utter conviction that his voice needed to be heard by the British public.
In the centenary of Taylor's birth, Chris Wrigley's biography seeks to soften this unattractive composite of his subject's character. With meticulous research, interviews and access to private papers, Wrigley has reassembled the life of the 20th century's most industrious history man. For students of diplomatic history, academic feuding and the development of the public historian in a multimedia age, it is a rich work. Unfortunately, such a project has already been performed twice in recent years. Wrigley's biography comes on the back of masterful studies by Adam Sisman and Kathleen Burk, as well as Taylor's own autobiography. And apart from an often painfully detailed chronological approach, Wrigley seems to offer little fresh. Indeed, there is much overlap in the material: down to the minutiae of both Sisman and Wrigley referencing a story of Taylor's mother being scalded by a hot water bottle.
Nonetheless, the story is a good one. In his own carefully crafted self-image, Taylor was the radical Nonconformist from Manchester whose genius paved his way to Oxford and a lifelong fight with the southern intellectual and cultural establishment - a struggle he eventually lost when Hugh Trevor-Roper pipped him to the Regius chair and Taylor was forced to find fame and money in journalism. Along the way, there were numerous wives, fights, sulks and truly great works of popular and academic history.
There was also politics. Wrigley is excellent at tracing the ideological evolution of Taylor from his late Victorian liberal inheritance to doctrinaire Marxist to Labour party supporter and CND activist. At every stage, Taylor adopted the relevant party line with communist-like rigour. So much so that when his friend Malcolm Muggeridge reported in 1933 on the true state of Soviet Russia, Taylor responded: "I really would like to say what terrible grief and pain your late articles about Russia cause your friends, but then what's the good? We all have to do pretty unpleasant things to raise money ..."
Yet Taylor's Marxist politics rarely infected his historical research. Rather than embracing economic determinism, he made his name in the interwar years among the archives of central Europe, studying the high diplomatic history of 1848. What the early history did point to was Taylor's obsession with the nefarious nature of Germany in European history. Wrigley rightly points to the role of the Jewish émigré Lewis Namier in embedding a prejudice that culminated in Taylor's The Course of German History (1945) and its focus on the problem of the "German character". Interestingly, Wrigley also highlights how this anti-German sentiment was one of the few realms where Taylor seeded an intellectual legacy. In the 1970s, his own anti-Germanism transformed into hostility towards the EU, and among his protégés were the Eurosceptic academics Alan Sked and Norman Stone - the latter's thinking informing Thatcherite diplomacy in the late 1980s.
The 1940s were a good time to be a historian of European diplomacy. Taylor wrote leaders and book reviews for the Manchester Guardian, harried the patrician publisher Harold Macmillan to cough up proper royalties, and began his enormously successful career as a public lecturer for the Historical Association. He also honed his reputation as a controversialist: he was withdrawn from home-front lecturing during the second world war after expressing anti-imperialist sentiments.
Taylor revelled in being known as a "troublemaker" (the title he gave to his Ford Lectures on the history of British radicals). From his academic base at Oxford, he seduced London's mushrooming media world. Making an easy transition from radio to television, he became a familiar face on In the News, complete with trademark bow-tie. It proved a wealthy career. There was an awful lot of dross: the execrable Sunday Express columns, the shoddy collection of "essays", the chat-show appearances. But there was also the magnetic brilliance of his TV lectures delivered straight to camera without notes, entrancing millions on the subject of the Russian revolution, British prime ministers, even "Men of the 1860s" (try getting that past ITV commissioners today). Taylor also salvaged his academic reputation following the debacle of his Origins of the Second World War, which seemed to dismiss Hitler as a mildly incompetent statesman, with English History 1914-1945, an incredible display of narrative history, populist radicalism, English patriotism and - with its spellbinding "England Arise!" last paragraph - stylistic verve.
But what was it all for? Taylor was adamant that history had very little to teach the modern age. Instead, the past was mostly a random concatenation of events that could go any way at any time - hence his opposition to nuclear weapons as a terrible force in the unstable hand of man. History, he thought, should ideally be written as a novel, with all the style, wit and cynicism that entailed. His hero was Macaulay, whose gripping yarns lay on the bedside tables of young ladies. The irony was that Taylor, the great architect of popular history, in fact had very little faith in its capacity to inform the public.
Taylor once claimed that his lifelong struggle had been for truth. In reality, his greatest monument was that studiously developed self-image of himself: troublemaker, patriot, empiricist, Englishman. No doubt he would have been delighted by the appearance of this third (and hopefully final) biography.
· Tristram Hunt's Building Jerusalem: the Rise and Fall of the Victorian City is published by Phoenix
· To order AJP Taylor: Radical Historian of Europe for £21 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to theguardian.com/bookshop
