A. J. P. Taylor

A. J. P. Taylor was one of Britain's most popular and authoritative historians. He wrote major scholarly works of British and diplomatic history, which also became bestsellers, and he was much admired for the many impromptu television lectures he gave.

Alan John Percivale Taylor was born in Lancashire in 1906. He was educated at Bootham School in York before winning a scholarship to read History at Oriel College, Oxford, where he received a first-class degree. He then became a lecturer in Modern History at Manchester University from 1930 to 1938, and from then until 1976 was a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. He was later made an Honorary Fellow of Magdalen and received honorary doctorates from, among others, Bristol, Warwick and Manchester universities. His books include The Course of German History; The Last of Old Europe; How Wars Begin; How Wars End; The Trouble Makers; Beaverbrook; Essays in English History; Europe: Grandeur and Decline; and his autobiography, A Personal History. His most important works are still in print, of which Penguin publish Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman; The Origins of the Second World War; The First World War; The Second World War: An Illustrated History; The Habsburg Monarchy 1809-1918; The War Lords; a collection of his essays on nineteenth-century Europe entitled From Napoleon to the Second International; and From the Boer War to the Cold War, a further collection of his essays.

A. J. P. Taylor died in September 1990. In his obituary, The Times paid tribute to him as 'probably the most controversial, and certainly the best known, historian in the English-speaking world. In his prime A. J. P. Taylor attracted - and usually bewitched - a wider following than Macaulay ever dreamt of. Prolific and best-selling author, gifted journalist, and sui generis as a television star, he attempted to transform the historical understanding of his day.'