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Europe: Grandeur and Decline
Children use all their senses to develop early learning skills at nursery. Tracing tactile numbers and counting and repeating will gently familiarise children with the shapes and sounds of numbers from 1 to 20.
- GenresHistoryEssaysNonfiction
384 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1974
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About the author
A.J.P. Taylor
114 books194 followersAlan John Percivale Taylor was an English historian of the 20th century and renowned academic who became well known to millions through his popular television lectures.
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September 27, 2018“there is a third way between Utopianism and despair. That is to take the world as it is and to improve it; to have faith without a creed, hope without illusions, love without God.” (p.336)
AJP Taylor was in the news recently, despite being dead, as the information was released that he had been spied upon by the UK government on account of his membership of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament back in the day.
Oddly enough the revelation fitted in perfectly with the generally pessimistic tone of the writings in this book, a collection of essays and book reviews written mostly in the early 1950s arranged in the order of the chronology of their theme, starting with Napoleon and ending just after Stalin. Europe, for Taylor at that time, was dead. The ECC was but a twinkle in the eye of the European Coal and Steel Community. The USA and the Soviet Union dominated world politics. The threat of nuclear war could be tasted in the air. Such was the outcome of the years of politics from Napoleon onwards.
Growing up, and actually this is a somewhat less irrelevant digression that normal, there were only three television channels. The commissioning of a fourth was the occasion of measured excitement, particularly once I could see the extra little white bit plonked on top of the Crystal palace transmitter. In the early days of the conventionally named channel four they broadcast apparently whatever they could get hold of cheaply including the already dead Professor AJP Taylor lecturing on “Why Wars begin” (or possibly “Why Wars end”) a series in which he lectured uninterrupted and unsupported even by blurry OHP, or ancient slides at the camera. It was pretty good television, though I admit myself to be a biased critic whose treasured telly moment was a camera panning across the ruins of Roman Ostia with only the sound of insects to accompany it on an old Open University programme, but I digress again. Something of the same comes through these writings: a fierce drive and an obvious sense of the personality who wrote them.
After reading his book on the first world war I was pleased to notice a couple of the same ideas crop up in these earlier writings. One was his concept of cigar butt strategy (p317), the other his continuing surprise that politicians contemplating military action rarely if ever consider the capability of their armed forces to execute those undertakings. In this I increasingly recognise myself, I've picked up a couple of ideas and apply them everywhere, like the red paint in Diary of a Nobody. Indeed I am the man with a hammer, don't waste your breath trying to persuade me that there isn't a nail there. Man, though, is the operative term, and this is something that does leap out at me from older books as I slowly tune into it, since the default human is a man in all these essays. I have the awkward feeling that there were only four women in this book, three of them Pankhursts.
The judgements are always fun, the pieces are all short. The sense of the continuing evaluation, often on political grounds, of particular issues - for example Neville Chamberlain and the Munich agreement is interesting. Sadly even the clear sightedness of of hindsight is refreshing - as on the inevitability of the Nazi-Soviet Pact given the refusal of the European inter-war democracies to work with the Soviets.
Lets have a couple of quotes in lieu of a review:
”It is fitting that historians in what is called the age of the masses should abandon the archives for the study of public opinion – a study, however, more easily preached than practised. How can we take a Gallup poll among the dead? The study of public opinion has changed only too often into a study of newspapers – a subject also of great interest but one attended with more difficulties than the unworldly historian supposes. Do newspapers voice public opinion or make it? Do they lead or follow? Often neither. They obey the directive of a government agent; dance to the whims of a proprietor; or, more rarely, express the policy of a great editor. Most frequently of all, they put in enough news and articles to fill the space. Little of this was recognised by the earnest scholars, usually American, who pursued the trail of public opinion” (pp.171-2)
”From the time of Columbus until the time of Gandhi, Stalin, and Mao Tse-tung, European man – and especially the educated classes of Europe – lived on the plunder of the rest of the world. The process has been running down in the last half century; and its end is now in sight...No doubt the game is up for the inhabitants of this island; in the long perspective of history this would be a small price to pay if the inhabitants of Asia were to achieve in the next half century something like the freedom from want we have known” (p.373)
AJP Taylor was in the news recently, despite being dead, as the information was released that he had been spied upon by the UK government on account of his membership of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament back in the day.
Oddly enough the revelation fitted in perfectly with the generally pessimistic tone of the writings in this book, a collection of essays and book reviews written mostly in the early 1950s arranged in the order of the chronology of their theme, starting with Napoleon and ending just after Stalin. Europe, for Taylor at that time, was dead. The ECC was but a twinkle in the eye of the European Coal and Steel Community. The USA and the Soviet Union dominated world politics. The threat of nuclear war could be tasted in the air. Such was the outcome of the years of politics from Napoleon onwards.
Growing up, and actually this is a somewhat less irrelevant digression that normal, there were only three television channels. The commissioning of a fourth was the occasion of measured excitement, particularly once I could see the extra little white bit plonked on top of the Crystal palace transmitter. In the early days of the conventionally named channel four they broadcast apparently whatever they could get hold of cheaply including the already dead Professor AJP Taylor lecturing on “Why Wars begin” (or possibly “Why Wars end”) a series in which he lectured uninterrupted and unsupported even by blurry OHP, or ancient slides at the camera. It was pretty good television, though I admit myself to be a biased critic whose treasured telly moment was a camera panning across the ruins of Roman Ostia with only the sound of insects to accompany it on an old Open University programme, but I digress again. Something of the same comes through these writings: a fierce drive and an obvious sense of the personality who wrote them.
After reading his book on the first world war I was pleased to notice a couple of the same ideas crop up in these earlier writings. One was his concept of cigar butt strategy (p317), the other his continuing surprise that politicians contemplating military action rarely if ever consider the capability of their armed forces to execute those undertakings. In this I increasingly recognise myself, I've picked up a couple of ideas and apply them everywhere, like the red paint in Diary of a Nobody. Indeed I am the man with a hammer, don't waste your breath trying to persuade me that there isn't a nail there. Man, though, is the operative term, and this is something that does leap out at me from older books as I slowly tune into it, since the default human is a man in all these essays. I have the awkward feeling that there were only four women in this book, three of them Pankhursts.
The judgements are always fun, the pieces are all short. The sense of the continuing evaluation, often on political grounds, of particular issues - for example Neville Chamberlain and the Munich agreement is interesting. Sadly even the clear sightedness of of hindsight is refreshing - as on the inevitability of the Nazi-Soviet Pact given the refusal of the European inter-war democracies to work with the Soviets.
Lets have a couple of quotes in lieu of a review:
”It is fitting that historians in what is called the age of the masses should abandon the archives for the study of public opinion – a study, however, more easily preached than practised. How can we take a Gallup poll among the dead? The study of public opinion has changed only too often into a study of newspapers – a subject also of great interest but one attended with more difficulties than the unworldly historian supposes. Do newspapers voice public opinion or make it? Do they lead or follow? Often neither. They obey the directive of a government agent; dance to the whims of a proprietor; or, more rarely, express the policy of a great editor. Most frequently of all, they put in enough news and articles to fill the space. Little of this was recognised by the earnest scholars, usually American, who pursued the trail of public opinion” (pp.171-2)
”From the time of Columbus until the time of Gandhi, Stalin, and Mao Tse-tung, European man – and especially the educated classes of Europe – lived on the plunder of the rest of the world. The process has been running down in the last half century; and its end is now in sight...No doubt the game is up for the inhabitants of this island; in the long perspective of history this would be a small price to pay if the inhabitants of Asia were to achieve in the next half century something like the freedom from want we have known” (p.373)
May 22, 2024
Masterful essays that cover a very broad field, written in a clever narrative style. AJP Taylor was one of those typical Anglosaxon intellectuals with a sharp eye and a tremendous erudition.
December 30, 2018
A really great book that I've been reading on and off for years. I love A J P Taylor's style and subjective but well-informed commentary on the past. It gets depressing towards the end (not A J P's fault) when you suddenly realise how duplicitous World leaders were and are.
If there is one thing this book tells you is that what goes around most certainly comes around, again and again and again.
Would that we would learn from the past, but mankind being what it is, we never do and probably never will.
If there is one thing this book tells you is that what goes around most certainly comes around, again and again and again.
Would that we would learn from the past, but mankind being what it is, we never do and probably never will.
May 17, 2018
a marvelous historian, if unfashionable among melt and rightist circles. He is at his best at exposing anticommunism and russophobia, most of this writings here should still seem fresh to most sane people
February 17, 2025
A few sparkling bon mots does not a great book make. These essays very quickly get bogged down in the diplomatic minutiae that so fascinate Taylor and so bore the rest of humanity - or at least me.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews