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“... and energy to make a difference. But regrets of that sort, at lost opportunities, what A.J.P. Taylor called turning points where Germany ‘failed to turn’, afflict every student of the country. Every spring, no matter how eloquent my lectures, Hitler comes to power and doom follows. How many times have I told a class that if only William I had died ...”

“... in the water.Given Johnson’s rough and ready way with people, a complicated figure like A.J.P. Taylor detains him for longer than you’d expect. At Oxford Johnson knew and admired him; he envied his prolific output; he liked him – not the same as admiration – and also definitely didn’t. In the end, Taylor emerges ...”

“... was never up to much. It is important to remember that when reading Ten Days. The late A.J.P. Taylor, in his Introduction to the 1966 Penguin edition, called Reed a ‘great writer’ but warned that the book was not history; as in Insurgent Mexico, Reed was unreliable about the dates and order of events, offered second-hand accounts as firsthand, added ...”

“... for all the oceans of ink spilt, no one has ever managed to explain what the war was about. A.J.P. Taylor said it happened because the Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s chauffeur took the wrong turning. By meditating on the Berlin-Baghdad Railway one might come to the conclusion that, like our present crisis, it was ‘all about’ oil. The question remains wide ...”

“... periodisation. The 20th century necessarily falls into two halves, pre- and post-1945: A.J.P. Taylor was right to call the final chapter of his famous English History 1914-45, ‘Ending’. It is for the same reason that so much popular history in this country remains fixated on the Forties to an extent which seems indecent in Europe, where they find it ...”

“... book on The Cotton Masters 1830-60 (1984), Howe might have gone on to explain what A.J.P. Taylor was getting at in 1957 when he wrote in Encounter: Manchester is as distinctive in its way as Athens or Peking. It is the symbol of a civilisation which was, until recently, an ambition of mankind, though now little more than a historical ...”

“... was played out. Reviewing Nicholas Bethell’s The Palestine Triangle 30 years ago, A.J.P. Taylor said that no Englishman could contemplate the story of the last years of Mandatory Palestine without some sense of shame. And he added, just as truly, that ‘the role of the American administration was despicable throughout.’ One man who knew what he ...”

“... the historical errors of – variously but far from exhaustively – Arnold Toynbee, A.J.P. Taylor, Maurice Cowling, Lawrence Stone and the Cerberus of Scottish historiography, William Ferguson. But if the softer, gentler Trevor-Roper outlived many – though by no means all – of his foremost adversaries, their pupils and heirs had not forgotten the ...”

“... it. A stock vision of undergraduates then (gleaned from movies like A Yank at Oxford with Robert Taylor) was of a young man in dressing-gown and slippers, a towel round his neck en route for the distant baths. I didn’t run to a dressing-gown and slippers either: ‘Nobody’ll mind if you just wear your raincoat,’ my mother reassuringly said. I wasn’t ...”

“... friends A.L. Rowse, Lord David Cecil, Maurice Bowra, Roy Harrod, Neville Coghill, and A.J.P. Taylor and his wife Margaret.’ Graham’s older brother Raymond was principally an endocrinologist, but when his career in the 1930s is under discussion we are told that ‘he enjoyed obstetrics and, years later, took a retrospective pride in having delivered ...”

“... McFarlane has figured in accounts of the period chiefly as the colleague and opponent of A.J.P. Taylor with whom he shared the history teaching at Magdalen. Taylor achieved the kind of fame Bruce wanted none of, but, unlike Taylor, Bruce managed without effort to acquire a body of ...”

“... and thus a member of Magdalen senior common room. It was a daunting community, with A.J.P. Taylor, Gilbert Ryle and C.S. Lewis regularly met with on high table. I didn’t have much small talk but what was the point as one seldom got a word in with Taylor and had I had anything to chat to Ryle about it would have ...”

“... discreditable’ – by having relationships with men in his company in an army which, as A.J.P. Taylor said, ‘kept its antique class structure inviolate’ – or that his homosexuality was more than a phase, ‘an outgrowth of his Uppingham education’. She claimed that he was ‘just deeply romantic about his friends, as musicians are’. While ...”

“... in all volumes. ‘To hell with Scotland, Northern Ireland and still more the Empire!!’ A.J.P. Taylor wrote in 1961, as he contemplated writing his volume for the old Oxford History. Yet as the marked difference in geographical spread and coverage between Boyd Hilton’s volume and the earlier Oxford histories of 18th and 19th-century ...”

“... and banking and more intervention in the economy. ‘Nobody in Europe,’ Steil quotes A.J.P. Taylor writing in 1945, any longer ‘believes in the American way of life – that is, private enterprise.’ The challenge for the US, then, was not simply to find a way to get dollars to Europeans so they could buy American surplus goods, but, more ...”