British Prime Ministers and Other Essays

A.J.P. Taylor died in 1990, his famous television history lectures are now themselves part of broadcasting history and his controversial volume in the Oxford History of England is being replaced. Time moves on. Taylor has already been the subject of one superb bestselling biography (by Adam Sisman) and another is on the way. But despite the passage of time he remains one of the most appealing and accessible writers on British political history in particular and modern European history in general. This collection, reliably edited by Chris Wrigley who has done so much to perpetuate Taylor's work, brings together the transcripts from three of his lecture series ("British Prime Ministers", "How Wars Begin" and "How Wars End"), together with a range of other reviews and articles spanning five decades of writing and research. Taylor is punchy and provocative on British history and ingenious and compelling on diplomacy and warfare. Other themes get ample airing too: The left in Britain, intellectual life after the war and, more poignantly, the fading metropolitan charm of his native Lancashire. Modern scholars may question Taylor's reliability but few would doubt his power to argue and to entertain, surely the hallmark of a great historian. --Miles Taylor

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