Mentions personal use of The Illustrated History of the First World War.

Transcript context

…On philosophy of history, what did you take from A. J. P. Taylor? “Men only learn from history how to make new mistakes.” That’s one of Taylor’s many throwaway lines. Taylor was my hero when I was a schoolboy. I applied to Magdalen College, Oxford because I thought he was a fellow there. He had been, but I was young, we didn’t have the internet, and I hadn’t realized that he’d stopped being a fellow there some years before I turned up. I read Taylor as a schoolboy, beginning with the Illustrated History of the First World War, which is a potboiler, really, but it’s just full of fantastic writing. Taylor was as good a prose stylist as George Orwell. We should really put them in the same league when it comes to improving the way we write English. Taylor loved the paradox. He loved to be the contrarian. His Origins of the Second World War is still a masterpiece of polemical writing. The Struggle for Mastery in Europe is just a tour de force that transformed my thinking about 19th-century history, but it’s just brilliant writing. I also remember a great Taylor line about historical sensibility being a little bit like a musical sensibility. Taylor understood that one was really engaged in something closer to music than science, and I think that’s right. He was a very scrupulous diplomatic historian of the old school. Taylor really did believe in the Rankean principle that you plowed through the documents and tried to construct the sequence of events that way. He’s fantastically scathing in his review of Kissinger’s first book, a review that I only found by chance — this is A World Restored, a book that has many merits, but Taylor despised it because of its flourishes and the fact that they’re not really anchored in the documents. From a philosophy-of-history point of view, where do you think Taylor’s Second World War book went wrong? Hitler is too much of a bumbler, right? What happened there?…

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