Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
Concept
A. J. P. Taylor
Summary
Alan John Percivale Taylor (25 March 1906 – 7 September 1990) was a British historian who specialised in 19th- and 20th-century European diplomacy. Both a journalist and a broadcaster, he became well known to millions through his television lectures. His combination of academic rigour and popular appeal led the historian Richard Overy to describe him as "the Macaulay of our age". In a 2011 poll by History Today magazine, he was named the fourth most important historian of the previous 60 years.
Taylor was born in 1906 in Birkdale, Southport, which was then part of Lancashire, only child of cotton merchant Percy Lees Taylor and schoolmistress Constance Sumner Taylor (née Thompson). In 1919 his family returned to Ashton-on-Ribble, Preston, where both his parents' families had lived for several decades. His wealthy parents held left-wing views, which he inherited. Both his parents were pacifists who vocally opposed the First World War, and sent their son to Quaker schools as a way of protesting against the war (his grandmother was from an old Quaker family). These schools included The Downs School at Colwall and Bootham School in York. Geoffrey Barraclough, a contemporary at Bootham School, remembered Taylor as "a most arresting, stimulating, vital personality, violently anti-bourgeois and anti-Christian". In 1924, he went to Oriel College, Oxford, to study modern history. During his time as an undergraduate, he was the first student to hold the position of secretary of the junior common room, between 1925-6.
In the 1920s, Taylor's mother, Constance, was a member of the Comintern while one of his uncles was a founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Constance was a suffragette, feminist, and advocate of free love who practised her teachings via a string of extramarital affairs, most notably with Henry Sara, a communist who in many ways became Taylor's surrogate father. Taylor has mentioned in his reminiscences that his mother was domineering, but his father enjoyed exasperating her by following his own ways.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.