When he wrote it, 30 years after the war’s end, A J P Taylor thought it ‘about the right time to look at the Second World War with detachment’. But, as he also explained in the book’s preface, he had been composing the book ‘for more than 30 years’ – in fact, ever since he had begun giving monthly commentaries in Oxford and other towns on the war as it unfolded.
Here, then, is a masterpiece rooted in the war itself, yet refined by three decades of further study and reflection; a masterpiece written by one of the greatest British historians of the 20th century.
Alan Taylor – usually known as A J P Taylor – was born in Lancashire in 1906 into a solidly middle-class but also strongly left-wing family. Educated at Bootham School, York, and Oriel College, Oxford, he was recruited into the British Communist Party in the early 1920s, but soon left to join the Labour Party, of which he remained a staunch member for the rest of his life.
