History is just one damned thing6/10/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() (One of my favorite Taylor legends has him arriving at the studio in 1953 to give a talk about Napoleon, only to be told of Stalin's death and asked to lecture instead on the life of a very different dictator-which he did, in his unflappable way.) He was the only person who could get Oxford undergraduates out of bed early in the morning-and in vast numbers, to sit in the chilly Examination Schools and listen to him talk (for exactly fifty-five minutes and again without notes) on modern European history.Īlan Taylor wrote one of the most enduring works of diplomatic history, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848-1918 (1954, and never out of print), yet he also wrote potboilers that swiftly faded from sight and use. He was one of the first of the British "telly dons," who could stand in front of the camera and pontificate without notes about virtually anything. He was that diminutive bow-tied Oxford academic who, with Canon Collins and Michael Foot, marched in protests organized by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Anyone living in England during the 1950s and 1960s who was politically alert knew about A.J.P. ![]()
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