Alan John Percivale Taylor

Alan John Percivale Taylor 1906-90, English historian, primarily interested in diplomatic and Central European history. Educated at Oxford, he became a fellow of Magdalen College in 1938. He appeared frequently on British radio and television and was a columnist for the Manchester Guardian and other British newspapers. Taylor was one of the leaders of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the 1950s and a frequent critic of British foreign policy. His best-known works, contentious interpretations of the origin of modern wars, include an exoneration of Otto von Bismarck in Bismarck, the Man and the Statesman (1955), an indictment of Germany holding it responsible for World War I in The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848-1918 (1954), and his most controversial book, The Origins of the Second World War (1961), a condemnation of French and English isolationism and vacillation.

Bibliography: See his autobiography (1983); biographies by A. Sisman (1994) and K. Burk (2001).

Taylor, A. J. P., ( Alan John Percivale Taylor) (1906–90), historian. His many publications include The Habsburg Monarchy (1941), The Troublemakers (1957, from his Ford lectures), The Origins of the Second World War (1961), a life of Beaverbrook (1972), and an autobiography, A Personal History (1983). He also became widely known as a journalist and television personality.

London Magazine,
1. a periodical (1732–85) founded in opposition to the Gentleman's Magazine;

2. a magazine of great brilliance (1820–9), established under the editorship of John Scott; it was non-political and gave a large proportion of its space to writers and books. Scott championed the work of the younger writers, including Words-worth, Lamb, De Quincey, Clare, Hood, Carlyle, and in particular the ‘Cockney School’, Keats, Leigh Hunt, and Hazlitt. But he was soon provoked into attacks on Blackwood's, and he was killed in a duel by a representative of that magazine. John Taylor succeeded as editor with the assistance of Hood;

3. a monthly literary magazine founded in 1954 by J. Lehmann, and edited by him until 1961. Alan Ross was editor from 1961 to 2001. It was welcomed in its first issue by T. S. Eliot as a non-university-based periodical that would ‘boldly assume the existence of a public interested in serious literature’. Its distinguished contributors have included MacNeice, E. Waugh, R. Fuller, Auden, C. Causley, D. Walcott, G. Ewart.