British Prime Ministers and Other Essays

by A. J. P. Taylor, Alan J. P. Taylor

Overview

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 are reissuing three volumes of essays expertly assembled and introduced by Chris Wrigley.

This third volume is the most wide-ranging, including essays on British Prime Ministers from Sir Robert Walpole to Anthony Eden; How Wars Begin; How Wars End; The Congress of Vienna and, one of his more unlikely heroes, Lord Beaverbrook.

'He (Taylor) presented history in a vibrant, living, communicable form with many crucial messages for the present . . . this collection reminds is of his vast contribution.' Andrew Roberts, Daily Telegraph

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780571243211
Publisher:	Faber and Faber
Publication date:	05/28/2008
Pages:	462
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.03(d)

About the Author

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.