A.J.P. Taylor

The public opinion polls telling us which political party will win the next general election are rarely right and I don’t much care whether they are right or wrong. The census every ten years of film critics naming the world’s ten best films is a different matter and stirs my zest for controversy. The most recent list has just been published and I am glad to report that it contains no film less than 19 years old. The critics are becoming as conservative as I am, though they do not show this with some of the films they have recently recommended. I will not mention any that would have fallen under my ban except to remark that, in my opinion, neither persistent sexual intercourse nor lesbianism is a suitable subject for general exhibition.

In the days of my youth I kept a diary – not occasional reflections set down at the instruction of an editor but systematic jottings recording the events of each day. The diary became a slavery. Not a day passed without my sitting down to write in it. I imposed events on myself so that I should have something to write about. Passages were inserted in order to please or sometimes to offend my friends and relations. In fact, there came a time when the diary existed more than I did. When I reached man’s estate I ceased to write in my diary and destroyed all the previous volumes. I have never regretted this decision. All that remains of my diary-keeping is a reading-list in which I have recorded the titles of all the books I have read from 1926 to the present day. This comes in useful to remind me of books I had quite forgotten. It also fills me with shame to discover the amount of time I wasted on books not worth reading. But this is a habit that still persists.

In one way or another I have now been teaching Modern European History for at least fifty years. When I looked back I realised with some embarrassment that most of the time I had been dealing with one war or another, or wars in general. I can’t claim any expert knowledge of war: in fact, the nearest I have come to war was in 1940, when I and other members of the Home Guard patrolled round Oxford gas works. We foresaw with a flash of strategical penetration that the entire German parachute force would land on Oxford, if only because Oxford was supposed to be in those days a seat of learning. Why it should concentrate on the gas works I never understood. However, there we were on summer evenings, plodding round the gas works with unloaded rifles, waiting for the enemy who never came. That is the nearest I have been to a military experience. And yet war has dominated my life. The first book I published was about the Austro-Sardinian war of 1848, a war no doubt somewhat obscure to most of you: the last of my books, published in 1976, was a history of the Second World War, so I have kept moving. But I have rarely reflected on the general character of war. I do not propose to do so now: rather, to make some personal comments on how I and other historians have treated the subject.

Sitting in Waterlow Park the other afternoon, I heard a park keeper ask an old lady with a transistor, ‘What is happening in the Cup Final?’ – to which the old lady replied: ‘Which one do you mean – the one at Wembley or the one at the Falklands?’ The park keeper returned: ‘Wembley of course. We have got to win in the Falklands, we are in the right.’ This is, I think, the general reaction when people consider the Falklands affair. Stage one: the Argentine occupation was totally unjustified – this appears to me indisputable. Stage two: therefore we are not only entitled to throw the Argentinians out again, it is our duty to do so. This, too, commands general agreement though it is not beyond argument. I do not believe that we have a duty to remedy every act of injustice, even if it is comitted against our own people. At any rate, we arrive at stage three: our victory is not only beyond argument, its consequences can be prolonged indefinitely. This final stage of discussion follows logically on what came before but it seems to me far from inevitable.

This country has faced the choice of war or peace on some ten or twelve occasions during my lifetime. I was too young to have an opinion on the outbreak of the First World War, then known as the Great War. Thereafter I assumed I should always be against war even when it was conducted in the name of collective security. I opposed going to war over Manchuria in 1932 and campaigned energetically against going to war over Abyssinia in 1935. I even opposed the sending of British troops to Shanghai in 1927. Then, much to my surprise, I turned round. I did not actually advocate war over the Rhineland in 1936, believing – I still think rightly – that it was a lost cause. But I was very hot on the side of war for Czechoslovakia in 1938 and for Poland in 1939. I applauded the Second World War and still do, being rebuked by a former pupil the other day for describing it as ‘a good war’. Afterwards I swung round again: against the war for Korea in 1951 and very much against the Suez aggression in 1956.