This column is supposed to be about fiction, but it ought to be about good writing in general. Paul Lay, editor of History Today, has picked out his top five narrative histories, mixing ancient and modern classics. I can’t dissent from his judgment that Edward Gibbon is the master of the genre. Nor can I challenge his admiration for Diarmaid MucCulloch’s Reformation, a book that merits the title ‘seminal’. But I will say a word for the historian who inspired my love of history: A.J.P. Taylor.
The summer holidays of my childhood and teens were largely spent in the cricket net, bowling at a lone stump or the occasional visiting friend. This vigil was broken every year for two weeks by a trip to rural France. The house was remote, perched on a wooded cliff in the foothills of the Alps. There were no people, there was no television; there were just books and the mistral that blows down to the Mediterranean.
An eclectic library had accumulated over the years, contributed to by anyone who came to the house. Steadily, I graduated from Biggles to Conan Doyle, from Brigadier Gerard to an assortment of Victorian novelists, and from them to The Golden Bowl — a great work that suffers from being totally unreadable.
There were several rites of passage along the way: To Kill A Mockingbird read through the thunder of an August storm at night, Put Out More Flags read on a precarious li-lo in the swimming pool, The Great Gatsby read between puffs on a not too surreptitious cigarette.
But in hindsight, the most important book I read there was The Struggle For Mastery in Europe 1848-1918, A.J.P. Taylor’s most famous work. Its genius lies in disguising deep scholarship and trenchant opinion with prose that is as beguiling as the silks of the orient. It is thrilling, drawing the reader deeper into the period and its esoteric intrigues.
Above all, it showed the importance of clarity of thought and expression. Taylor was ruthlessly clear, as his fabled demolitions of Hugh Trevor-Roper on television demonstrate. The clip above, taken from a documentary made in the ‘90s, gives a glimpse of that lucidity, as well as his unassuming presenting. I wonder what Gibbon would have been like on TV — irrepressible is my guess.
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