A. J. P. Taylor facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
A. J. P. Taylor
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![]() Taylor in 1977
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Born |
Alan John Percivale Taylor
25 March 1906 Southport, England
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Died | 7 September 1990 (aged 84) London, England
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Alma mater | Oriel College, Oxford |
Occupation | Historian |
Spouse(s) |
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Awards | Fellow of the British Academy |
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".
Personal life
Taylor married three times. He married his first wife, Margaret Adams, in 1931 (divorced in 1951) and with her he had four children. For a time in the 1930s, he and his wife shared a house with the writer Malcolm Muggeridge and his wife Kitty. It was suggested that he had had an affair with Kitty Muggeridge.
Taylor lived for a while in Disley, Cheshire, where Dylan Thomas (who was his first wife's lover) was his guest; he later provided Thomas with a cottage in Oxford so that he could recover from a breakdown. His second wife was Eve Crosland, whom Taylor married in 1951 and divorced in 1974; he had two children by her. Even after divorcing Margaret Adams, Taylor continued to live with her, while maintaining a household with Eve. His third wife was the Hungarian historian Éva Haraszti, whom he married in 1976.