Introduction

Abstract

A. J. P. Taylor was a British diplomatic historian who also wrote commentaries on politics and international affairs — which is like observing that Vanessa Redgrave is a British actress who sometimes does film. There is rather more to it. Like Ms Redgrave, Taylor brought to his work an outlook shaped by his personal response to the times in which he lived, using a style that lay somewhere between scholarly objectivity journalism and theatre, and which, he maintained, was uniquely his own. Television and journalism, he once argued, are done in a rush and may appear inaccurate or imprecise, as compared to a scholarly text. But ‘you cannot chop a human being into different creatures as a scholar and a play-boy. He is all of a piece.’¹