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A. J. P. Taylor

English historian (1906-1990)

Alan John Percivale Taylor (25 March 1906 – 7 September 1990) was a British historian, journalist, broadcaster and scholar. His approachably written and sometimes contentiously revisionist studies of 19th and early 20th-century subjects brought academic history to a new audience.

Quotes

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1930s

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  • A revolution cannot be judged by the ordinary standards of academic morality.
    • Review of a biography of Maximilien Robespierre in The Manchester Guardian (14 January 1936), quoted in Adam Sisman, A. J. P. Taylor: A Biography (1994; 1995), p. 104
  • Injustice occurs in free states as in despotic states; and the attempt to right the wrong is as unpopular and dangerous in the one as in the other – as the case of Zola shows. The difference between free and unfree countries is that in the free country there are always men who will champion the unpopular cause at whatever the cost. It is this stage army of the good, with its slightly ridiculous reappearances which alone keeps our liberties alive. The Dreyfus case, at its outset, was a disgrace for France; but because of the struggles of a small minority it ended in bringing France more glory than all the campaigns of Napoleon.
    • Review of Pierre Dreyfus's biography of Alfred Dreyfus in The Manchester Guardian (7 May 1937), quoted in Chris Wrigley, A.J.P. Taylor: A Complete Annotated Bibliography and Guide to His Historical and Other Writings (1980), p. 6
  • The average Englishman was ashamed of the British Empire and believed (quite wrongly) that it had been acquired in some wicked fashion... This sense of sin placed British governments at a disadvantage in their negotiations with Germany: they were convinced of the justice of German grievances even before the grievances were expressed. British governments had spent most of the nineteenth century trying to prevent the growth of the British Empire, and still it had grown; German governments had done their utmost to encourage colonial enterprise, and yet their empire was a failure; clearly it was the fault of British governments and they must put it right... there they stood, ears anxiously cocked for the next German complaint. Moreover, British politicians have always been peculiarly sensitive to the charge of "unfriendliness" towards other politicians or other countries... Granville's letters to Herbert Bismarck—my dear fellow, what can be wrong?—are not unique in the record of British policy, and if the dear fellow insists on this or that as the price of renewing eternal friendship, of course he must have it.
    • Germany's First Bid for Colonies, 1884–1885: A Move in Bismarck's European Policy (1938), pp. 14-15
  • Anglo-German relations between 1884 and 1914 abound in these private letters and unofficial visits, culminating in another British surrender and renewed protestations of friendship. But in the last years before 1914 British politicians were beginning to realise that only one thing could end these quarrels and secure German friendship for ever—the adoption of a policy which would give the Germans what they called security, but what to others appeared as German hegemony over the entire continent of Europe. Even Gladstone and Granville would have been unwilling to buy German friendship at this price.
    • Germany's First Bid for Colonies, 1884–1885: A Move in Bismarck's European Policy (1938), p. 15
  • The only danger to history today is that historians are sometimes too modest and try to find excuses for their task. It is safer as well as sounder to be confident. Men write history for the same reason that they write poetry, study the properties of numbers, or play football—for the joy of creation; men read history for the same reason that they listen to music or watch cricket—for the joy of appreciation. Once abandon that firm ground, once plead that history has a "message" or that history has a "social responsibility" (to produce good Marxists or good Imperialists or good citizens) and there is no logical escape from the censor and the Index, the O.G.P.U. and the Gestapo.
    • 'The Historian', The Manchester Guardian (5 August 1938), quoted in Chris Wrigley, A.J.P. Taylor: A Complete Annotated Bibliography and Guide to His Historical and Other Writings (1980), p. 265
  • The details of diplomatic history do indeed seem of irredeemable triviality; but in fact, diplomatic history deals with the greatest of themes – with the relations of States, with peace and war, with the existence and destruction of communities and civilization.
    • 'Diplomatic History', The Manchester Guardian (23 May 1939), p. 17

1940s

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  • The object of policy is not to prove one's moral worth, but to succeed.
    • Time and Tide (23 May 1942), quoted in Chris Wrigley, A.J.P. Taylor: A Complete Annotated Bibliography and Guide to His Historical and Other Writings (1980), p. 284

The Course of German History (1945)

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  • The history of the Germans is a history of extremes. It contains everything except moderation, and in the course of a thousand years the Germans have experienced everything except normality.
    • p. 13
  • 1848 was the decisive year of German, and so of European, history: it recapitulated Germany's past and anticipated Germany's future. Echoes of the Holy Roman Empire merged into a prelude of the Nazi "New Order"; the doctrines of Rousseau and the doctrines of Marx, the shade of Luther and the shadow of Hitler, jostled each other in bewildering succession. Never has there been a revolution so inspired by a limitless faith in the power of ideas; never has a revolution so discredited the power of ideas in its result. The success of the revolution discredited conservative ideas; the failure of the revolution discredited liberal ideas. After it, nothing remained but the idea of Force, and this idea stood at the helm of German history from then on. For the first time since 1521, the German people stepped on to the centre of the German stage only to miss their cues once more. German history reached its turning-point and failed to turn. This was the fateful essence of 1848.
    • p. 68
  • British history has been made by a series of true compromises. The landed classes compromised with the merchants at the beginning of the eighteenth century; this coalition compromised with the industrial capitalists in the time of Peel; and Peel's coalition has compromised with the industrial workers in our own day. Since the days of Cromwell there has never been in England a class or a party determined to force through its extreme claims, whatever the cost; the terrible exception was in the early months of 1914. No such compromise took place in Germany. The Bismarckian Reich was a dictatorship imposed on the conflicting forces, not an agreement between them.
    • p. 115
  • The failure of the "good Germans," not the ranting of the "bad" ones, was the real crime of Germany against European civilization.
    • p. 146
  • This is the explanation of the paradox of the "Third Reich." It was a system founded on terror, unworkable without the secret police and the concentration camp; but it was also a system which represented the deepest wishes of the German people. In fact it was the only system of German government ever created by German initiative. The old empire had been imposed by the arms of Austria and France; the German Confederation by the armies of Austria and Prussia. The Hohenzollern empire was made by the victories of Prussia, the Weimar republic by the victories of the Allies. But the "Third Reich" rested solely on German force and German impulse; it owed nothing to alien forces. It was a tyranny imposed upon the German people by themselves.
    • p. 213

1950s

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  • It is the theme which has run through European history since the French Revolution—the search for stability in an unstable world. The great revolution destroyed tradition as the basis for society; ever since men have been seeking for something to take its place.
    • From Napoleon to Stalin: Comments on European History (1950; 1953), p. 9
  • Human reason is the only saviour we have... We need more education, not less; more science, not less; more hope for the future, and more confidence in it.
    • 'My Religion', Daily Herald (10 January 1953), p. 5
  • The Communist Party is not concerned with peace or with better conditions; it is only concerned with power. It exploits everyone, including its own members, for this purpose.
    • 'Conversion', New Statesman and Nation (14 February 1953), p. 185-186
  • National freedom is as important as economic freedom or the freedom of the individual.
    • 'We're the hypocrites about this!', Daily Herald (28 February 1953), p. 3
  • I am against inequality of the sexes, as much as I am against class privilege or colour prejudice.
    • 'Women Prefer To Be Slaves!', Daily Herald (21 March 1953), p. 3
  • The United States remains a country where there is trial by jury and more freedom of expression of every sort of opinion than anywhere else in the world – including England.
    • 'Does today mean nothing to you?', Daily Herald (4 July 1953), p. 4
  • War must come into the record of history, whatever else is left out. It has been the greatest single factor in the shaping of human history.
    • 'Ding-Dong', The Observer (23 May 1954), p. 8
  • Quakerism has always been in danger of smugness, and is redeemed from it only by an obstinate radicalism.
    • Review of Viscount Templewood's Nine Troubled Years in the Manchester Guardian (13 November 1954), quoted in Chris Wrigley, A.J.P. Taylor: A Complete Annotated Bibliography and Guide to His Historical and Other Writings (1980), p. 372
  • Once hitch yourself to the Establishment and you must become the supporter of injustice sooner or later.
    • 'The Affair', New Statesman and Nation (23 April 1955), p. 586
  • The things that really matter have nothing to do with politics. Love between friends. Good books. The beauties of nature.
    • 'I'd rather look at a lovely view than march on May Day', Daily Herald (4 May 1955), p. 4
  • Maxton's failure was more than the failure of a man. It was the failure of a movement – the movement of romantic revolutionary socialism. Keir Hardie, Maxton's predecessor, could combine romance and reality... Revolutionary Socialism turned into the Bolshevik dictatorship; parliamentary Socialism achieved the practical gains of the Welfare State. There was no third way between Lenin and Arthur Henderson.
    • 'A Wasted Life', The Observer (15 May 1955), p. 16
  • I am not a philosophic historian. I have no system, no moral interpretation. I write to clear my mind, to discover how things happened and how men behaved. If the result is shocking or provocative, this is not from intent, but solely because I try to judge from the evidence without being influenced by the judgements of others.
    • Englishmen and Others (1956), p. vii
  • The massacre of Peterloo shook the moral prestige of the old order as nothing else had done; and English democracy owes a lasting debt to the eleven martyrs of St. Peter's Fields.
    • 'An English Massacre', The Observer (2 March 1958), p. 16
  • In my experience Communism is intellectual alcohol – nasty and harmful if taken neat, but an essential ingredient of every stimulating drink.
    • 'Babe in the Wood', New Statesman (31 October 1959), p. 592

Rumours of Wars (1952)

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  • In essence, Toryism rests on doubt in human nature; it distrusts improvement, clings to traditional institutions, prefers the past to the future. It is a sentiment rather than a principle.
    • "Tory History", p. 15
  • The traditional "liberties of England" rested on law and custom, not on rational dogma; and the man who maintained them, as in Poland or Hungary, was the country squire. He maintained them no doubt for his own profit and advantage, a point which Feiling is inclined to slide over; still England would not be a free country without him. The unique feature of our history is that the conservative defender of liberty had to take other classes into partnership, and finally indeed found himself in the position of a tolerated minority.
    • "Tory History", p. 16
  • From Luther to Hitler the Germans have always wanted an iron framework of discipline to keep them in reasonable order; when they lose this, they go mad, as Nietzsche did, and it was only to be expected that the Germans would follow his example rather than his teaching.
    • "Nietzsche and the Germans", p. 49
  • In the last resort the national question is not a question of schools or of government officials—these are mere preliminaries. It is a question of power. Men wish to decide their own destinies. In a national State this leads them to resist kings and emperors and to demand democracy. In a multinational State they resist the rule of other nationalities as well.
    • "The Failure of the Habsburg Monarchy", p. 70

The Trouble Makers: Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1792-1939 (1957)

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Conformity may give you a quiet life; it may even bring you to a University Chair. But all change in history, all advance, comes from the nonconformists. If there had been no trouble-makers, no Dissenters, we should still be living in caves.
Comprises the text of the Ford Lectures on English History (1956); quotations are cited from the 1985 edition, ISBN 0140225757
  • Every historian loves the past or should do. If not, he has mistaken his vocation; but it is a short step from loving the past to regretting that it has ever changed. Conservatism is our greatest trade-risk; and we run psychoanalysts close in the belief that the only "normal" people are those who cause no trouble either to themselves or anybody else.
    • "The Radical Tradition: Fox, Paine, and Cobbett", p. 14
  • Conformity may give you a quiet life; it may even bring you to a University Chair. But all change in history, all advance, comes from the nonconformists. If there had been no trouble-makers, no Dissenters, we should still be living in caves.
    • "The Radical Tradition: Fox, Paine, and Cobbett", p. 14
  • In my opinion we learn nothing from history except the infinite variety of men’s behaviour. We study it, as we listen to music or read poetry, for pleasure, not for instruction
    • "The Radical Tradition: Fox, Paine, and Cobbett", p. 23.
  • The present enables us to understand the past, not the other way round.
    • "The Radical Tradition: Fox, Paine, and Cobbett", p. 24.
  • The worker is by nature less imaginative, more level-headed than the capitalist. This is what prevents his becoming one. He is content with small gains. Trade Union officials think about the petty cash; the employer speculates in millions. You can see the difference in their representative institutions. There is no scheme too wild, no rumour too absurd, to be without repercussions on the Stock Exchange. The public house is the home of common sense.
    • "Dissenting Rivals: Urquhart and Cobden", p. 55
  • American statesmen might like some Europeans more than others and even detect quaint resemblances to their own outlook; but they no more committed themselves to a particular group or country than a nineteenth-century missionary committed himself to the African tribe in which he happened to find himself.
    • "The Great War: The Triumph of E. D. Morel", p. 157

1960s

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  • Communists have no principle or belief except the seizure of power by their party.
    • 'The Second Munich', New Statesman (20 February 1960), pp. 260-261
  • The New Deal was the nearest thing to a revolution ever carried out in a democracy.
    • 'Men at Work', The Observer (8 May 1960), p. 23
  • Why should knowledge of where I came from tell me where I am going to?
    • 'Moving with the Times', The Observer (22 October 1961)
  • He detested titles. This, no doubt, is why he distributed them so lavishly.
  • Politically we are not Europeans and never have been.
    • 'Why don't these ‘Top People’ think for themselves?', The Sunday Express (21 October 1962), p. 16
  • The First World War had begun — imposed on the statesmen of Europe by railway timetables. It was an unexpected climax to the railway age.
    • The First World War ([1963] 1970) p. 20
  • In 1917 European history, in the old sense, came to an end. World history began. It was the year of Lenin and Woodrow Wilson, both of whom repudiated the traditional standards of political behaviour. Both preached Utopia, Heaven on Earth. It was the moment of birth for our contemporary world.
    • The First World War ([1963] 1970) p. 165
  • Like most of those who study history, he learned from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones.
    • Referring to Napoleon III, in "Mistaken Lessons from the Past", The Listener (6 June 1963)
  • The great underlying conflict was between freedom and organization. Could the war be conducted by 'Liberal' methods—that is, by voluntary recruiting and by laissez-faire economics? Or must there be compulsory military service, control of profits, and direction of labour and industry?
    • 'Politics in the First World War', Politics in Wartime and Other Essays (1965), p. 21
  • The Commune was...heroic, with its strange mixture of patriotism and working class idealism, a mixture which no historian will ever clearly resolve.
    • 'Martyrdom of Paris', The Observer (7 November 1965), p. 26
  • I think you can say that the British were more responsible than anyone for the destruction of Nazism and Fascism in Europe.
    • World War (n.d. but 1966), p. 7
  • The peace of the world depends on American strength and, still more, on American restraint.
    • 'Peace Comes of Age', The New York Times Magazine (14 August 1966), p. 72
  • Economic planning from above can be carried out in peacetime only by the aid of fines, prisons, and ultimately concentration camps.
    • 'Should we hail Cousins as a hero?', The Sunday Express (11 September 1966), p. 16
  • [The Common Market] is a political device for creating a European alliance by a back door... From feebleness, folly or sheer blindness, they are betraying all that has made us great over the centuries.
    • 'The awkward truth that no one wants to face', The Sunday Express (14 May 1967), p. 14
  • CARD (Campaign Against Racial Discrimination) should be by now a bigger movement than CND at its biggest. It isn't. We have all turned cowards.
    • 'Labour's First Year: A Review Of The Government's Record. Radicals Comment on the Anniversary', New Statesman (15 October 1967), p. 557
  • We too should be true to our tradition. That tradition is one of national independence and Splendid Isolation.
    • 'Will Germany be the next to explode?', The Sunday Express (2 June 1968), p. 14

The Origins of the Second World War (1961)

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  • [Hitler] aimed to make Germany the dominant Power in Europe and maybe, more remotely, in the world. Other Powers have pursued similar aims, and still do. Other Powers seek to defend their vital interests by force of arms. In international affairs there was nothing wrong with Hitler except that he was a German.
  • In my opinion, statesmen are too absorbed by events to follow a preconceived plan. They take one step, and the next follows from it. The systems are created by historians, as happened with Napoleon; and the systems attributed to Hitler are really those of Hugh Trevor-Roper, Elizabeth Wiskemann, and Alan Bullock.
    • p. 98
  • A racing tipster who only reached Hitler's level of accuracy would not do well for his clients.
    • The Origins of the Second World War ([1961] 1962), Ch. 7, p. 134
  • It [the Munich Agreement] was a triumph for all that was best and most enlightened in British life; a triumph for those who had preached equal justice between peoples; a triumph for those who had courageously denounced the harshness and short-sightedness of Versailles. Brailsford, the leading Socialist authority on foreign affairs, wrote in 1920 of the peace settlement: "The worst offence was the subjection of over three million Germans to Czech rule." This was the offence redressed at Munich.
    • p. 235

English History 1914–1945 (1965)

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  • In the second World war the British people came of age. This was a people's war. Not only were their needs considered. They themselves wanted to win. Future historians may see the war as a last struggle for the European balance of power or for the maintenance of Empire. This was not how it appeared to those who lived through it. The British people had set out to destroy Hitler and National Socialism—"Victory at all costs". They succeeded. No English soldier who rode with the tanks into liberated Belgium or saw the German murder camps at Dachau or Buchenwald could doubt that the war had been a noble crusade. The British were the only people who went through both world wars from beginning to end. Yet they remained a peaceful and civilized people, tolerant, patient, and generous. Traditional values lost much of their force. Other values took their place. Imperial greatness was on the way out; the welfare state was on the way in. The British empire declined; the condition of the people improved. Few now sang "Land of Hope and Glory". Few even sang "England Arise". England had risen all the same.
    • p. 600
  • History gets thicker as it approaches recent times: more people, more events, and more books written about them. More evidence is preserved, often, one is tempted to say, too much. Decay and destruction have hardly begun their beneficent work.
    • "Revised Bibliography" (1975 ed.), p. 729
  • Taylor's Law states: "The Foreign Office knows no secrets."
    • "Revised Bibliography" (1975 ed.), p. 730

1970s

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  • There are some moral principles more important to me than economics. I am against racial discrimination. I am against privilege. I am for the sovereign independence of this country and for the unity of the Commonwealth. Labour does not help me on any of these.
    • 'Why I won't be voting Labour this time', The Sunday Express (7 June 1970), p. 25
  • Many nations have made great sacrifices for others and none has made more than his own two countries, Great Britain and the United States.
    • 'Grand Fleet berthed', The Observer (21 June 1970), p. 31
  • The Commune illustrates the general principle that a revolution occurs not simply as a matter of material suffering, but when a regime is discredited by incompetence and failure... The Communards, though not factory workers, were proletarians in the original sense. They were the eternally oppressed, and they aspired, however clumsily, to found a society where the tyranny of the few over the many would cease for evermore.
    • 'A shattered Utopia', The Observer (30 May 1971), p. 28
  • The Arabs have justified grievances in the Middle East. The Palestinians should weigh heavy on the conscience of the Great Powers.
    • 'The Little Nation I Salute This Morning', The Sunday Express (9 March 1975), p. 16
  • My experiences in the General Strike cured me of communism... I decided that the Communist Party was not for me and quietly lapsed, thus escaping the soul torments that troubled so many intellectuals during the 1930s.
    • 'Class War: 1926', New Statesman (30 April 1976), pp. 572-573
  • When I wrote English History 1914–1945 I believed that victory and the Attlee government made a triumphant conclusion. Now I feel differently. The incompetence of an arrogant governing class has led the country to decay and ruin.
    • 'London Diary', New Statesman (27 August 1976), p. 268
  • Our basic conviction is that the world owes us a living... We need new and ruthless leadership. We need an economic order where the creative leaders receive greater rewards and the administrators receive less.
    • 'Why sweat your guts out if a man can be £4 a week better off than you without doing a stroke of work?', The Sunday Express (3 October 1976), p. 7
  • I came of Radical, Dissenting stock on both sides. A collateral ancestor of my father's was killed at Peterloo. My maternal great-grandfather voted for Orator Hunt at the Preston by-election in 1830 and received one of the medals struck in honor of "the free and independent voters of Preston." My father was a Lloyd George Radical before the First World War.
    • 'Accident Prone, or What Happened Next', The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 49, No. 1 (March 1977), p. 2
  • I called myself a Marxist from the time I became a Socialist. But, reading more history at Oxford, I began to feel that Marxism did not work. Consider the famous sentence in the Communist Manifesto: "The history of all hitherto recorded society is the history of class struggles." Very impressive but not true. Perhaps all history ought to have been the history of class struggles, but things did not work out that way. There have been long periods of class collaboration and many struggles that were not about class at all. I suppose my mind is too anarchic to be fitted into any system of thought. Like Johnson's friend Edwards, I, too, have tried to be a Marxist but common sense kept breaking in.
    • 'Accident Prone, or What Happened Next', The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 49, No. 1 (March 1977), p. 4
  • Monetarism has triumphed... whatever Callaghan and others may say Enoch Powell, it seems, has been right all along.
    • 'London Diary', New Statesman (26 August 1977), p. 270
  • The Normans were savage destroyers who brought ruin to a flourishing culture and stamped their brutality on the land and on its architecture. The old Radicals were not all that wrong when they attributed the evils of our society to the Norman conquest and looked back to Anglo-Saxon times as a golden age.
    • 'Foundation stones', The Observer (11 June 1978), p. 28
  • Trevor-Roper is inclined to depreciate the Whig interpretation of history. I still see its merits. After all, our political forerunners stumbled on a system of government the least imperfect that has been known. We still benefit from their inheritance. We still enjoy ordered liberty. The authority of the states is still limited though not as much as it should be. Macaulay erred, I think, when he added to the Whig interpretation the great delusion of his age, which was until the other day the great delusion of ours: belief in limitless progress and in the possibility, indeed the inevitability, of limitless improvement, both moral and material.
    • 'Leviathan of history', The Observer (29 July 1979), p. 37

1980s

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  • The greatest problem about old age is the fear that it may go on too long.
    • An Old Man's Diary ([1981] 1984) p. 39
  • I was a narrative historian, believing more and more as I matured that the first function of the historian was to answer the child's question, "What happened next?"
    • A Personal History ([1983] 1984) p. 301

Quotes about A. J. P. Taylor

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  • This is a brilliant book; almost every sentence crackles and there is often a whiff of fire and brimstone in the air.
    • Asa Briggs, review of Rumours of Wars in The New Statesman and Nation (6 December 1952), p. 698
  • Mr. Taylor is a master of brilliant paradox, startling juxtapositions, and dogmatic brevity... But his brilliance suggests the crystal chandelier: sparkling at night but less impressive when closely examined by the cold light of day.
    • Sidney Bradshaw Fay, review of Rumours of Wars in The American Historical Review, Vol. 59, No. 3 (April 1954), p. 590
  • Mr. Taylor is in the very first rank. He is among English historians to-day about what Mr. Evelyn Waugh is among English novelists, a rescuer of forgotten truths, a knight of paradox, a prince of story-telling, and a great, maybe the greatest, master of his craft.
    • Sebastian Haffner, 'Mr. Taylor's Masterpiece', The Observer (16 April 1961), p. 30
    • A review of The Origins of the Second World War
  • Mr. Taylor carries out his revaluation in the clear, sharp, epigrammatic prose which makes all his work as stimulating as champagne – and which makes one wonder, sometimes, whether it was all really as simple as that. His mind is a convex mirror in which events appear brilliantly coloured, brilliantly distinct, and sometimes a little distorted. He has many of the virtues of Macaulay, and one or two of his faults. The pattern is too sharply etched; the epigrams are too neat; the judgements are too final: but how refreshing it is to read a historian who is not afraid of patterns, epigrams and judgements!
    • Michael Howard, 'The Iron Chancellor', The New Statesman and Nation (9 July 1955), pp. 47-48
    • A review of Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman
  • The fine line, it seems to me, goes thus: there has to be a plausibility in your story. A history book—assuming its facts are correct—stands or falls by the conviction with which it tells its story. If it rings true, to an intelligent, informed reader, then it is a good history book. If it rings false, then it’s not good history, even if it’s well written by a great historian on the basis of sound scholarship.
    The best-known example of the latter was A. J. P. Taylor's Origins of the Second World War. It is a beautifully written tract, the work of a consummate diplomatic historian: an expert in the relevant documents, a competent linguist and highly intelligent. At first sight, all of the constituent parts of a good history book were present. So what was missing? The answer is hard to pin down. Perhaps the issue is one of taste. To claim—as Taylor did—that Hitler was not responsible for World War II is absurdly counterintuitive. However subtly expressed, the argument is so implausible as to be poor history.
    • Tony Judt, in Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century (2012), Chap. 7 : Unities and Fragments: European Historian
  • His gritty, disrespectful, stay-at-home world contains nothing of the elements which made Britain the power whose passing he regretted – the derring-do of its soldiers and sailors, the colonial dynamism, the Kiplingesque ethos of its "imperial" working class. His is indeed a Little England, and one deformed by his insensitivity to anything aesthetic or spiritual in the way life is lived... [His influence conveyed contempt for] everything that the word "Establishment" stands for... a whole generation of schoolchildren was indirectly exposed to his wicked shafts of doubt and deflation.
    • John Keegan, 'A Great Little Englander', The Daily Telegraph (22 January 1994), quoted in Kathleen Burk, Troublemaker: The Life and History of A. J. P. Taylor (2000), p. 409
  • Mr. A.J.P. Taylor is the only English historian now writing who can bend the bow of Gibbon and Macaulay... The result is a masterpiece: lucid, compassionate, beautifully written in a bare, sparse style, and at the same time deeply disturbing.
    • David Marquand, 'The Taylor Doctrine', New Statesman (21 April 1961), quoted in Wm. Roger Louis (ed.), The Origins of the Second World War: A. J. P. Taylor and His Critics (1972), pp. 65-66
    • A review of The Origins of the Second World War
  • I picked up Alan Taylor at the Athenaeum and walked with him along the Strand and Fleet Street. Taxed him with being a fellow-traveller and asked him what he thought he was getting at. He was slightly disconcerted, I fancy, but said that he quite recognised the impracticability of the position of the Socialist who believes in working with the Communists, but that he prefers this position, even so, to working with Anti-Communists. I said it seemed to me quite insane. He is now a Fellow of Magdalen, Oxford and, altogether, very well dug into the economic system which he wants to destroy.
    • Malcolm Muggeridge, diary entry (13 April 1948), quoted in Like It Was: The Diaries of Malcolm Muggeridge, ed. John Bright-Holmes (1981), p. 267
  • A. J. P. Taylor has written just such a challenging essay, packed with substantial summaries and spiced with brilliant observations, reflecting his scholarly maturity, his lucid mind, and his Vienna training under Pribram and the Austrian school of Friedjung and Redlich... An answer to a burning query, it is an impatient book, vivid and tempestuous, pointed and pugnacious, concise and overzealous, severe and sarcastic, ambitious and angry. Grandiose in style it often overshoots its mark. The profound is mixed with the wisecrack. It has the shortcomings of its virtues. It will shock the scholarly reader but it must challenge him too.
    • Sigmund Neumann, review of The Course of German History in The American Historical Review, Vol. 52, No. 4 (July 1947), pp. 730-731
  • A serious historian must abide religiously by what is true. So no wonder universities would not appoint Taylor to the chairs he was anxious to get. He never seems to have understood why not, nor why his dreadful book about Hitler's war shocked so many people. An Oxford colleague called him "a dishonest historian".
    • A. L. Rowse, 'History and Hot Air', The Evening Standard (20 January 1994), quoted in Kathleen Burk, Troublemaker: The Life and History of A. J. P. Taylor (2000), p. 409
  • Alan Taylor I did find very exciting as an undergraduate. I must say I find today's undergraduates do so too.
    • Hugh Thomas, quoted in Frederic Raphael (ed.), Bookmarks (1975), p. 153
  • The book will also suggest that students of world politics should draw for their rules of interpretation rather less on Marx and rather more on Machiavelli.
    • W. K. H., review of A. J. P. Taylor, Germany's First Bid for Colonies, 1884–1885: A Move in Bismarck's European Policy in International Affairs, Vol. 17, No. 4 (July – August 1938), p. 558
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