From the Boer War to the Cold War Essays on Twentieth-Century Europe
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
A. J. P. Taylor (1906-1990) was the most famous and controversial historian of the twentieth century. Author of over thirty books, the three peaks of his scholarship are the massive and authoritative The Struggle for Mastery in Europe: 1848-1918, the idiosyncratic English History: 1914-1945 and the revisionist Origins of the Second World War. But there was much else. The Trouble Makers: Dissent Over Foreign Policy (1792-1939) was his own personal favourite. The essay often saw A. J. P. Taylor at his best, it was a medium well-suited to his pithy, provocative, epigrammatic style. After his death the best of his essays were selected and reassembled by Chris Wrigley into three volumes: From Napoleon to the Second International, From the Boer War to the Cold War and British Prime Ministers.A. J. P. Taylor could never be dull, least of all in the essay. The medium was perfect for his qualities. In expression he displayed elegant brevity: in argument paradox: in knowledge lightly-worn mastery. The result was an aphoristic concinnity only perhaps bettered among historians by Macaulay.
Faber Finds has reissued three volumes of Taylor's essays expertly assembled and introduced by Chris Wrigley. This second volume concentrates on the twentieth-century and, among other virtuoso displays, includes his controversial reappraisal of the beginnings of the First World War, 'War by Timetable' in which his relish of the paradox is seen at its most stimulating.
'Once you start reading, it is hard to stop ... The style is always arresting, the conclusions often startling. Taylor's subjects rage from Trotsky to Churchill, from Bernard Shaw to Malcolm Muggeridge.' Observer
'Once you start reading, it is hard to stop ...