Volume 5, Number 9 · December 9, 1965
Historian of the People
By Noel Annan
English History: 1914-1945
by A.J.P. Taylor
Oxford, 708 pp., $9.75
Taylor's volume, covering the period 1914-45 and the fifteenth in the Oxford History of England, is having, as might have been expected, a mixed reception in his own country. Some academic historians have condemned it as a characteristic product of his perversity, brittle cleverness, and intellectual frivolity. It seems to them old-fashioned in concentrating upon the maneuvers of politicians and diplomats and on the clash between interest groups. They deplore what they call his gross lack of discrimination in making judgments and his refusal to examine in depth the changes in the British social and economic structure and to relate these to the events he describes. Other historians have praised the wonderful readability of the book, the pace at which it moves, his mastery of the art of critical narrative, and his knowledge of the voluminous sources, which is so immense that even his most provocative judgments rest on an ability to disentangle a mass of evidence which few of his contemporaries can match. What other historian, they ask, could have written an account of political events with such authority when working under the iniquitous British Treasury rule whereby the archives of a period are closed to scholars until fifty years have elapsed?
Review, 2931 words
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