Alan John Percival Taylor

He married Margaret Adams, in 1931, with whom he had four children, before they divorced in 1951.

His second wife was Eve Crosland, whom he married in 1951 and had two children with her prior to their divorce in 1974.

Even when he was married to Eve, he would go on to live with Margaret, whom he passionately loved. He got married for a third time to �va Haraszti, a Hungarian historian.

Alan John Percivale Taylor was born to Percy Lees Taylor, and Constance Sumner Thompson, both of whom favored the Labor Party in England and were therefore, ardent left-wing supporters.

He attended the Bootham School in York, a Quaker school initially before going to the Oriel College, Oxford, in 1924, where studied modern history.

He graduated in 1927, after which he worked as a legal clerk for some time, before he travelled to Vienna to study the influence of the Chartist movement on the Revolution of 1848. Later, he turned his attention towards Italian unification, which he studied for two years.

The completion of the study gave way to his publication ‘The Italian Problem in European Diplomacy, 1847–49’ in 1934.

From 1930 to 1938, he lectured at the University of Manchester, as teacher of history.

In 1938, he was elected as a Fellow at the Magdalen College, Oxford.

He also started lecturing at Oxford on modern history from 1938 onwards, where due to his excellent oratory skills, he became very popular. He served in World War II as a Home Guard and around the same time, he lent his services to Political Warfare Executive, an underground British body, as an expert on Central Europe.

While continuing his teaching job, he also kept himself busy writing and publishing. He published ‘The Habsburg Monarchy’ in 1941, which was a detailed study of the Habsburg dynasty and Bismarck, a famous German statesman.

He was invited by BBC in their show ‘In The News’, as a member of the panel, in 1950. He was one of the early historians to be invited on television.

His book ‘The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848–1918’ is considered the work of a genius, which accounts the events in Europe after the fall of the Habsburg, Romanov, and Hohenzollern dynasties towards the end of the First World War.

In 1955, he published the biography of Otto von Bismarck, a very influential German politician, which became a best-seller.

His book ‘English History 1914–1945’, in which he glorified the history of England, was a huge success, selling more than any of Oxford’s ‘History of England’ volumes.