A. J. P. Taylor
Based on Wikipedia: A. J. P. Taylor
In 1961, a distinguished Oxford historian published a book arguing that Adolf Hitler hadn't actually planned World War Two. The war, he suggested, was more of an accident—a series of blunders and miscalculations by leaders across Europe, Hitler included. The book ignited a firestorm. His university essentially fired him. And yet, within a few years, that same book had become required reading for every serious student of the twentieth century.
The historian was A. J. P. Taylor, and controversy followed him like a shadow.
The Making of a Contrarian
Alan John Percivale Taylor was born in 1906 in the seaside town of Birkdale, near Liverpool, into circumstances that would shape his entire worldview. His parents were wealthy cotton merchants—and committed radicals. Both were pacifists who loudly opposed the First World War. His mother, Constance, was a suffragette, a feminist, and a member of the Comintern, the international communist organization directed from Moscow. She practiced what she preached about "free love" through a series of affairs, most notably with a communist named Henry Sara, who became something of a surrogate father to young Alan.
His uncle helped found the Communist Party of Great Britain.
The Taylors sent their son to Quaker schools as a form of protest against the war—his grandmother came from an old Quaker family. At Bootham School in York, a classmate remembered Taylor as "a most arresting, stimulating, vital personality, violently anti-bourgeois and anti-Christian."
He was nineteen years old.
At Oxford, Taylor joined the Communist Party himself, recruited by Tom Wintringham, a family friend and military historian. But he didn't last long. The General Strike of 1926—when British workers walked off their jobs in solidarity with coal miners—struck Taylor as a moment when the communists should have made their move. They didn't. He found their response ineffective and quit in disgust. He would remain a Labour Party member for the next sixty years, but never again a communist.
Interestingly, he visited the Soviet Union twice after leaving the party, in 1925 and 1934. Whatever he saw didn't bring him back into the fold.
The Historian Emerges
Taylor graduated from Oxford in 1927 with first-class honours. His initial research plan—studying how the Chartist movement influenced the Revolutions of 1848—fell through. So he pivoted to Italian unification, spending two years in Vienna examining the diplomatic tangles that led to a unified Italy. This became his first book, published in 1934.
He taught at Manchester from 1930 to 1938, living first in an eighteenth-century house in Didsbury, then in a village called Disley on the edge of the Peak District. In 1938, he moved to Oxford as a Fellow of Magdalen College, a position he would hold for nearly four decades.
At Oxford, something unusual happened: he became popular. So popular, in fact, that he had to schedule his lectures at 8:30 in the morning just to prevent the room from overflowing. This was unheard of. Most academics couldn't fill a lecture hall at noon. Taylor packed them in before breakfast.
The War Years and Central European Connections
During World War Two, Taylor served in the Home Guard—the volunteer defense force immortalized in the British comedy "Dad's Army"—while also working for the Political Warfare Executive as an expert on Central Europe. He gave radio broadcasts and spoke at public meetings, building the public profile that would later make him a television star.
But his most valuable wartime work was personal. He befriended exiled statesmen from the countries Hitler had swallowed: Mihály Károlyi, the former president of Hungary, and Edvard Beneš, the president of Czechoslovakia. Through these friendships, Taylor gained an intimate understanding of Central European politics that few British historians could match.
Beneš lived in exile in England, but as a head of state, he couldn't stay in London where the bombs fell. Instead, he was housed at Aston Abbotts, a Rothschild property that Taylor drily described as "of, for them, a modest standard." Bored and isolated, Beneš would summon audiences whenever possible. Taylor was often "swept over to Aston Abbotts in the presidential car."
In 1943, Taylor wrote a pamphlet arguing that Czechoslovakia would serve as a "bridge" between West and East after the war. This reflected Beneš's own theory of "convergence"—his belief that Western nations would become more socialist while the Soviet Union would become more democratic, eventually meeting in the middle. It was a hopeful vision.
It did not come to pass.
The Troublemaker's Favorite Book
Taylor's career produced many important works, but perhaps the one closest to his heart was "The Trouble Makers," published in 1957. Originally delivered as the prestigious Ford Lectures at Oxford, it examined those brave or foolish souls throughout British history who had criticized their government's foreign policy.
The topic came to him by accident. When invited to give the lectures, Taylor had no idea what to discuss. His friend Alan Bullock—himself a distinguished historian, author of a famous biography of Hitler—suggested the subject of foreign policy dissent. For Taylor, the born contrarian, the son of pacifists, the man who had joined and quit the Communist Party before he was twenty-one, it was perfect.
He was writing about his own kind.
Bismarck and the Accident Theory of History
In 1955, Taylor published a biography of Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian statesman who unified Germany in the nineteenth century. The conventional wisdom, established by German historians like Heinrich von Sybel, Leopold von Ranke, and Heinrich von Treitschke, held that Bismarck was a master planner who had methodically engineered German unification according to a grand design.
Taylor disagreed. He argued that Bismarck had unified Germany more by accident than by intention—seizing opportunities as they arose, improvising, stumbling into success. The book became a bestseller and established a theme that would recur throughout Taylor's work: history as accident, not design.
This would get him into serious trouble.
The Book That Changed Everything
In 1961, Taylor published "The Origins of the Second World War." It remains one of the most controversial history books ever written.
Taylor's argument was explosive. He rejected what he called the "Nuremberg Thesis"—the idea, established at the war crimes trials, that World War Two resulted from a criminal conspiracy by Hitler and his inner circle. This view, Taylor argued, was too convenient. It shielded other leaders from blame, let the German people off the hook, and conveniently made West Germany a respectable ally against the Soviets in the Cold War.
Instead, Taylor presented Hitler as a "normal" German leader whose foreign policy goals were essentially the same as those of the Weimar Republic before him. Hitler wanted Germany to be the strongest power in Europe, yes. But he didn't plan war. He was an opportunist, grabbing whatever chances presented themselves. The war that erupted in September 1939 was an accident—the result of miscalculations and mistakes by everyone involved, not a carefully orchestrated Nazi plot.
This was, to put it mildly, inflammatory.
Taylor was not defending Hitler. He portrayed the Nazi leader as a cynical, grasping opportunist whose only consistent beliefs were the pursuit of power and virulent antisemitism. But he argued that Hitler's antisemitism wasn't unique—millions of Germans shared those views, so why single him out? And he insisted that Hitler's foreign policy showed no evidence of a master plan.
The real problem, Taylor argued, was the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War One. It was harsh enough to ensure that virtually all Germans would hate it. But it wasn't harsh enough to destroy Germany's potential to become a great power again. This was inherently destabilizing. Sooner or later, German power would reassert itself against a treaty Germans considered unjust and a European order they had no interest in preserving.
World War Two wasn't inevitable, Taylor maintained. But the flawed peace settlement made it far more likely than not.
The Backlash
The reaction was fierce. In 1964, Oxford declined to renew Taylor's appointment as a university lecturer. Although he kept his college fellowship at Magdalen, the message was clear: he had crossed a line.
Taylor moved to London, lecturing at University College London and the Polytechnic of North London. But something unexpected happened: his book became a classic. Every subsequent discussion of World War Two's origins had to grapple with Taylor's arguments. Historians could disagree with him—many did, vehemently—but they couldn't ignore him.
In 1965, Martin Gilbert, himself a distinguished historian who would become Winston Churchill's official biographer, organized a festschrift in Taylor's honor—a collection of essays by former students and colleagues celebrating his work. Taylor eventually received three festschriften in total, in 1965, 1976, and 1986. This was extraordinary. Most historians never receive even one.
The Television Don
While his academic reputation weathered storms, Taylor was building something new: a career as a public intellectual. He became one of Britain's first television historians, delivering lectures directly to camera with no notes, no teleprompter, and no edits. Millions watched.
This combination of academic rigor and popular appeal was almost unprecedented. The historian Richard Overy called him "the Macaulay of our age"—a reference to Thomas Babington Macaulay, the great Victorian historian who had written bestselling histories that ordinary people actually read. In 2011, History Today magazine polled historians about the most important figures in their profession over the previous sixty years. Taylor came in fourth.
A Controversial Stand
Taylor never stopped being a troublemaker. In 1979, Anthony Blunt—a distinguished art historian and Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures—was publicly exposed as a Soviet spy who had passed secrets to Moscow during and after World War Two. The British Academy, the country's most prestigious scholarly organization, moved to expel him.
Taylor resigned in protest.
His reasoning was characteristically provocative: "It's none of our business, as a group of scholars, to consider matters of this sort. The academy's only concern should be his scholarly credentials, which are unaffected by all this."
Whether this was principled or perverse depends on your point of view. Either way, it was pure Taylor.
The Personal Life
Taylor married three times. His first wife, Margaret Adams, bore him four children before they divorced in 1951. During the 1930s, the Taylors had shared a house with the writer Malcolm Muggeridge and his wife—an arrangement that sounds like a setup for a British sitcom. The marriage frayed in the 1940s as Margaret developed "infatuations" with the journalist Robert Kee and the poet Dylan Thomas.
His second wife was Eve Crosland, sister of Anthony Crosland, who would become a prominent Labour politician and cabinet minister. They married in 1951, had two children, and divorced in 1974.
His third wife was Éva Haraszti, a Hungarian historian. They married in 1976, when Taylor was seventy years old. Given his lifelong interest in Central European history, there was a certain symmetry to ending up with a Hungarian scholar.
The Habsburg Question
Beyond the controversy over World War Two's origins, Taylor made lasting contributions to the understanding of Central European history. His 1941 book "The Habsburg Monarchy 1809–1918" (revised in 1948) offered a damning portrait of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The Habsburgs, Taylor argued, saw their territories purely as tools for foreign policy. They never tried to build a genuine nation-state. Instead, they held their multinational empire together by playing ethnic groups off against each other, promoting German and Hungarian hegemony over Czechs, Poles, Ukrainians, Romanians, Slovaks, Slovenes, Croats, and others.
This view was influenced by his mentor Lewis Namier, a Polish-born historian with little love for the empire that had ruled his homeland. Earlier in his career, Taylor had been more sympathetic to the Habsburgs, reflecting the views of another mentor, the Austrian-born Alfred Francis Pribram. Namier won out.
Ireland and the Question of Genocide
Perhaps Taylor's most incendiary statement came not in a book but in a book review. In 1962, reviewing Cecil Woodham-Smith's "The Great Hunger" about the Irish Famine of the 1840s, Taylor wrote:
"All Ireland was a Belsen. The English governing class ran true to form. They had killed two million Irish people."
He added that if the death rate wasn't even higher, "it was not for want of trying" on the part of the British government. He quoted Benjamin Jowett, the Master of Balliol College, Oxford, who had said: "I have always felt a certain horror of political economists since I heard one of them say that the Famine in Ireland would not kill more than a million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do much good."
Taylor later reprinted this review under the stark title "Genocide."
This was a British historian—proud to be British, as he often insisted—calling his own country's actions in Ireland genocidal, comparing them to Nazi death camps. It was characteristic Taylor: provocative, documented, impossible to dismiss, impossible to forget.
The Legacy
Taylor died in 1990, aged eighty-four. He had lived long enough to see "The Origins of the Second World War" transformed from scandal to syllabus. The book he had been essentially fired for writing became one of the most assigned texts in modern European history courses.
What are we to make of him? He was a brilliant writer who made history accessible to millions. He was a rigorous scholar whose arguments, even when wrong, forced other historians to sharpen their own thinking. He was a contrarian who seemed to relish controversy—the son of radicals who never stopped making trouble.
His argument that Hitler stumbled into war rather than planning it has been largely rejected by subsequent scholarship. The evidence of Nazi planning and intentionality is simply too strong. But Taylor's insistence that we look beyond the convenient "Nuremberg Thesis," that we examine the structural problems in the Versailles settlement, that we consider how the mistakes of many nations contributed to catastrophe—these insights endure.
He forced us to think harder about how wars begin. That's no small legacy.
In the end, perhaps the most fitting epitaph comes from Taylor himself, writing about those dissenting voices he celebrated in "The Trouble Makers." They were people who believed, as he did, that it was not only acceptable but necessary to challenge the conventional wisdom, to question the powerful, to insist that things everyone knew to be true might not be true at all.
Even when they were wrong, they made everyone else think more carefully.
Especially when they were wrong.