cover image TROUBLEMAKER: The Life and History of A.J.P. Taylor

TROUBLEMAKER: The Life and History of A.J.P. Taylor

Kathleen Burk, TROUBLEMAKER: The Life and History of A.J.P. Taylor

Few autobiographies of academics include a chapter on the subject's freelance income, but then Taylor (1906–1990) was no ordinary historian. Burk (Britain, America, and the Sinews of War 1914–1918) shows that, in addition to his prolific writing career (The Origins of the Second World War is the most famous of his dozens of books), the renowned British historian was a talking head long before CNN hit the airwaves. Taylor's former student and a history professor at University College, London, Burk examines her subject's rather ordinary childhood and his rise up Britain's academic ladder. Taylor was a professor at Oxford when WWII launched his extra-academic career. As he made his name writing for British newspapers and appearing on the BBC, this specialist in European diplomatic history also made enemies. His unpopularity among his fellow academics was partially due to his outspoken leftist views and sometime activism—in the 1950s, for instance, he was a leader in Britain's nuclear disarmament campaign. But it was also due to what the author, generally sympathetic to her subject, deems a difficult personality: "He was conceited and self-righteous, self-absorbed and self-contained, insensitive and thoughtless." Unfortunately, Burk only concedes Taylor's faults in the final chapter; until then, the reader is left wondering if jealousy and politics alone made him so controversial. Nor does Burk undertake a serious psychological examination of Taylor or an evaluation of his pioneering role as a television academic, either of which would have widened her readership. Nonetheless, this worthy book, with its balanced emphases on the professional and the personal, will please historians of every stripe. 16 pages of b&w photos. (Mar.)