Taylor-Made History - Gertrude Himmelfarb

Himmelfarb, Gertrude. "Taylor-Made History." The National Interest, no. 36. 1994.

Abstract:

PARADOXICAL perverse contrary, unconventional, A. J. P. Taylor is a biographer’s dream. The oddities of his personal life are fascinating, if not always edifying: his three unconventional marriages (he continued to live part-time with his first wife while married to his second and third wives); his first wife’s affairs, which bore an uncanny resemblance to those of his mother, and which he, like his father before him, tolerated; his attitude toward money (charging his friends interest on loans, and indignant- ly protesting, when his wife continued to give money to Dylan Thomas with whom she was enamored, that he “might have stood for anything else, but breaking one’s word over money went against my deepest principles – the sanctity of contract”); his relish for the good things of life while rep- resenting himself as a “man of the people” (the familiar “thinking left and living right” phenomenon); his yearning for the social and academic distinctions that he ostensibly scorned; his professing an enduring love for the North of England where he was born and brought up, while fleeing at the first opportunity to Oxford and London; his sycophantish relationship to Lord Beaverbrook, to the dismay of his friends (and to his own considerable advanage);