A.J.P. Taylor

I spent almost forty years of my life in Oxford. Seven years ago on my retirement I left Oxford and have hardly ever been there since. Much has changed. Dinner at Magdalen College now has only three courses, an economy which we resisted even during the Second World War. And of course there are girls everywhere. Last time I dined in Magdalen I sat next to a young lady who presented herself to me as a Fellow of the College. I said to her: ‘I hope you realise that it is thanks to me you are here. It was I who proposed the emancipating amendment to the College Statutes in 1976.’ She was most surprised and said: ‘Do you mean to say that once there were no women members of the College? I thought there had been women in Magdalen since its foundation.’ So temporary is fame.

Quite a time has passed since I last contributed a Diary to the London Review of Books, so long indeed that I have almost forgotten how to do it. Was my mind once flooding over with possible themes? I can hardly believe it. Certainly my mind is empty now. I stir my memory in vain. Here are some oddities that occur to me. The oddest is the persistence with which readers of the London Review of Books accuse me of supporting the wrong side in the Cold War and in particular of taking a sympathetic view of Hungary and its problems. The accusation about the Cold War is merely silly. I am against the Cold War and all that goes with it, as much against the Russians waging the Cold War, if they do, as against the Americans. The Cold War is a competition in obstinate misunderstanding. I doubt whether either side can remember how the Cold War started or what it is now about. They just go on parading their mutual distrust until it has become a way of life, and neither side will be satisfied until it has provoked a world explosion. I humbly think this is a mistake, but there is no limit to the extent of human folly.

As I write this paragraph the General Election is still almost four weeks away, and yet it seems already to have stolen the show. There is nothing else to read in the newspapers of any significance. My problem is that the General Election itself is of singularly little significance. No one in his senses imagines that the result will make the slightest difference. We have lived in the shadow of two great problems for the last ten years and more. One is unemployment; the other is inflation. To my mind, inflation is the more catastrophic of the two because it saps the very foundations of civilisation. Maybe I think this because I am too old and too lucky to be affected by unemployment. At any rate, there are the two great problems and neither of our two parties has the slightest idea what to do about them. Does anyone suppose that if the Conservatives win the election they will do any better than they have done for the last few years? Does anyone suppose that if Labour wins the election they will improve on their previous record when in office? They tell me that there is some sort of jumped-up third party, but I don’t think we need bother about that. Third parties rarely succeed. I can only think of the Labour Party between the wars and it has run out of steam now.

I have recently read The History Men by John Kenyon. I remember reading a different book, The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury, some years ago. I did not find Bradbury’s book at all funny, which I am told it is intended to be. After a careful reading I had not the slightest inkling of what the book was supposed to be about. Indeed I thought my mind was going. There is no such problem about Kenyon’s book. It is a well-written, straightforward account of how English history has been written in England during the last three or four hundred years. John Kenyon is very competent, very fair. He does not seem to have any favourite, though he admits that Gibbon, not a writer of English history, has slipped in because he was the greatest of English historians. Quite right, I think, even though Gibbon hardly passes any of the present-day tests. He never looked at a single manuscript text. He did not know that the past is different from the present. He captures the reader with his wit rather than his scholarship, though that is pretty good as well.

I recently celebrated my 77th birthday. I don’t know why I should describe myself as celebrating it. Celebrations of my birthday seem long ago now. I have a photograph of myself on my 13th, wearing a new Eton jacket and a starched collar. I am looking pleased enough, but appearances are misleading I vaguely recollect that I did not like the Eton jacket and doubt whether I ever wore it again. My mother intended that I should go to juvenile balls. I never learnt to dance and therefore never accepted invitations. The Eton jacket languished unworn.