Socialists From England

"One of the advantages of being over forty is that one begins to learn the difference between knowing and realising."

"Always ask for advice but never take it."

"Never compose anything unless the not composing of it becomes a positive nuisance to you."

"The enormity of the universe revealed by science cannot readily be grasped by the human brain, but the music of The Planets enables the mind to acquire some comprehension of the vastness of space where rational understanding fails."

"Music, being identical with heaven, isn't a thing of momentary thrills, or even hourly ones. It's a condition of eternity."

"If nobody likes your work, you have to go on just for the sake of the work. And you're in no danger of letting the public make you repeat yourself. Every artist ought to pray that he may not be "a success". If he's a failure he stands a good chance of concentrating upon the best work of which he's capable."

"This is a brilliant book; almost every sentence crackles and there is often a whiff of fire and brimstone in the air."

"I was a narrative historian, believing more and more as I matured that the first function of the historian was to answer the child's question, "What happened next?""

"The greatest problem about old age is the fear that it may go on too long."

"Trevor-Roper is inclined to depreciate the Whig interpretation of history. I still see its merits. After all, our political forerunners stumbled on a system of government the least imperfect that has been known. We still benefit from their inheritance. We still enjoy ordered liberty. The authority of the states is still limited though not as much as it should be. Macaulay erred, I think, when he added to the Whig interpretation the great delusion of his age, which was until the other day the great delusion of ours: belief in limitless progress and in the possibility, indeed the inevitability, of limitless improvement, both moral and material."

"The Normans were savage destroyers who brought ruin to a flourishing culture and stamped their brutality on the land and on its architecture. The old Radicals were not all that wrong when they attributed the evils of our society to the Norman conquest and looked back to Anglo-Saxon times as a golden age."

"Monetarism has triumphed... whatever Callaghan and others may say Enoch Powell, it seems, has been right all along."

"I called myself a Marxist from the time I became a Socialist. But, reading more history at Oxford, I began to feel that Marxism did not work. Consider the famous sentence in the Communist Manifesto: "The history of all hitherto recorded society is the history of class struggles." Very impressive but not true. Perhaps all history ought to have been the history of class struggles, but things did not work out that way. There have been long periods of class collaboration and many struggles that were not about class at all. I suppose my mind is too anarchic to be fitted into any system of thought. Like Johnson's friend Edwards, I, too, have tried to be a Marxist but common sense kept breaking in."

"I came of Radical, Dissenting stock on both sides. A collateral ancestor of my father's was killed at Peterloo. My maternal great-grandfather voted for Orator Hunt at the Preston by-election in 1830 and received one of the medals struck in honor of "the free and independent voters of Preston." My father was a Lloyd George Radical before the First World War."

"Our basic conviction is that the world owes us a living... We need new and ruthless leadership. We need an economic order where the creative leaders receive greater rewards and the administrators receive less."

"When I wrote English History 1914–1945 I believed that victory and the Attlee government made a triumphant conclusion. Now I feel differently. The incompetence of an arrogant governing class has led the country to decay and ruin."

"My experiences in the General Strike cured me of communism... I decided that the Communist Party was not for me and quietly lapsed, thus escaping the soul torments that troubled so many intellectuals during the 1930s."

"The book will also suggest that students of world politics should draw for their rules of interpretation rather less on Marx and rather more on Machiavelli."

"Alan Taylor I did find very exciting as an undergraduate. I must say I find today's undergraduates do so too."

"A serious historian must abide religiously by what is true. So no wonder universities would not appoint Taylor to the chairs he was anxious to get. He never seems to have understood why not, nor why his dreadful book about Hitler's war shocked so many people. An Oxford colleague called him "a dishonest historian"."

"A. J. P. Taylor has written just such a challenging essay, packed with substantial summaries and spiced with brilliant observations, reflecting his scholarly maturity, his lucid mind, and his Vienna training under Pribram and the Austrian school of Friedjung and Redlich... An answer to a burning query, it is an impatient book, vivid and tempestuous, pointed and pugnacious, concise and overzealous, severe and sarcastic, ambitious and angry. Grandiose in style it often overshoots its mark. The profound is mixed with the wisecrack. It has the shortcomings of its virtues. It will shock the scholarly reader but it must challenge him too."

"I picked up Alan Taylor at the Athenaeum and walked with him along the Strand and Fleet Street. Taxed him with being a fellow-traveller and asked him what he thought he was getting at. He was slightly disconcerted, I fancy, but said that he quite recognised the impracticability of the position of the Socialist who believes in working with the Communists, but that he prefers this position, even so, to working with Anti-Communists. I said it seemed to me quite insane. He is now a Fellow of Magdalen, Oxford and, altogether, very well dug into the economic system which he wants to destroy."

"Mr. A.J.P. Taylor is the only English historian now writing who can bend the bow of Gibbon and Macaulay... The result is a masterpiece: lucid, compassionate, beautifully written in a bare, sparse style, and at the same time deeply disturbing."

"His gritty, disrespectful, stay-at-home world contains nothing of the elements which made Britain the power whose passing he regretted – the derring-do of its soldiers and sailors, the colonial dynamism, the Kiplingesque ethos of its "imperial" working class. His is indeed a Little England, and one deformed by his insensitivity to anything aesthetic or spiritual in the way life is lived... [His influence conveyed contempt for] everything that the word "Establishment" stands for... a whole generation of schoolchildren was indirectly exposed to his wicked shafts of doubt and deflation."

"The fine line, it seems to me, goes thus: there has to be a plausibility in your story. A history book—assuming its facts are correct—stands or falls by the conviction with which it tells its story. If it rings true, to an intelligent, informed reader, then it is a good history book. If it rings false, then it’s not good history, even if it’s well written by a great historian on the basis of sound scholarship. The best-known example of the latter was A. J. P. Taylor's Origins of the Second World War. It is a beautifully written tract, the work of a consummate diplomatic historian: an expert in the relevant documents, a competent linguist and highly intelligent. At first sight, all of the constituent parts of a good history book were present. So what was missing? The answer is hard to pin down. Perhaps the issue is one of taste. To claim—as Taylor did—that Hitler was not responsible for World War II is absurdly counterintuitive. However subtly expressed, the argument is so implausible as to be poor history."

"Mr. Taylor carries out his revaluation in the clear, sharp, epigrammatic prose which makes all his work as stimulating as champagne – and which makes one wonder, sometimes, whether it was all really as simple as that. His mind is a convex mirror in which events appear brilliantly coloured, brilliantly distinct, and sometimes a little distorted. He has many of the virtues of Macaulay, and one or two of his faults. The pattern is too sharply etched; the epigrams are too neat; the judgements are too final: but how refreshing it is to read a historian who is not afraid of patterns, epigrams and judgements!"

"Mr. Taylor is in the very first rank. He is among English historians to-day about what Mr. Evelyn Waugh is among English novelists, a rescuer of forgotten truths, a knight of paradox, a prince of story-telling, and a great, maybe the greatest, master of his craft."

"Mr. Taylor is a master of brilliant paradox, startling juxtapositions, and dogmatic brevity... But his brilliance suggests the crystal chandelier: sparkling at night but less impressive when closely examined by the cold light of day."

"Like most of those who study history, he learned from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones."

"In 1917 European history, in the old sense, came to an end. World history began. It was the year of Lenin and Woodrow Wilson, both of whom repudiated the traditional standards of political behaviour. Both preached Utopia, Heaven on Earth. It was the moment of birth for our contemporary world."

"The First World War had begun — imposed on the statesmen of Europe by railway timetables. It was an unexpected climax to the railway age."

"Politically we are not Europeans and never have been."

"He detested titles. This, no doubt, is why he distributed them so lavishly."

"Why should knowledge of where I came from tell me where I am going to?"

"The New Deal was the nearest thing to a revolution ever carried out in a democracy."

"Communists have no principle or belief except the seizure of power by their party."

"American statesmen might like some Europeans more than others and even detect quaint resemblances to their own outlook; but they no more committed themselves to a particular group or country than a nineteenth-century missionary committed himself to the African tribe in which he happened to find himself."

"The worker is by nature less imaginative, more level-headed than the capitalist. This is what prevents his becoming one. He is content with small gains. Trade Union officials think about the petty cash; the employer speculates in millions. You can see the difference in their representative institutions. There is no scheme too wild, no rumour too absurd, to be without repercussions on the Stock Exchange. The public house is the home of common sense."

"The present enables us to understand the past, not the other way round."

"In my opinion we learn nothing from history except the infinite variety of men’s behaviour. We study it, as we listen to music or read poetry, for pleasure, not for instruction"

"Conformity may give you a quiet life; it may even bring you to a University Chair. But all change in history, all advance, comes from the nonconformists. If there had been no trouble-makers, no Dissenters, we should still be living in caves."

"Every historian loves the past or should do. If not, he has mistaken his vocation; but it is a short step from loving the past to regretting that it has ever changed. Conservatism is our greatest trade-risk; and we run psychoanalysts close in the belief that the only "normal" people are those who cause no trouble either to themselves or anybody else."

"In the last resort the national question is not a question of schools or of government officials—these are mere preliminaries. It is a question of power. Men wish to decide their own destinies. In a national State this leads them to resist kings and emperors and to demand democracy. In a multinational State they resist the rule of other nationalities as well."

"From Luther to Hitler the Germans have always wanted an iron framework of discipline to keep them in reasonable order; when they lose this, they go mad, as Nietzsche did, and it was only to be expected that the Germans would follow his example rather than his teaching."

"The traditional "liberties of England" rested on law and custom, not on rational dogma; and the man who maintained them, as in Poland or Hungary, was the country squire. He maintained them no doubt for his own profit and advantage, a point which Feiling is inclined to slide over; still England would not be a free country without him. The unique feature of our history is that the conservative defender of liberty had to take other classes into partnership, and finally indeed found himself in the position of a tolerated minority."

"In essence, Toryism rests on doubt in human nature; it distrusts improvement, clings to traditional institutions, prefers the past to the future. It is a sentiment rather than a principle."

"In my experience Communism is intellectual alcohol – nasty and harmful if taken neat, but an essential ingredient of every stimulating drink."

"The massacre of Peterloo shook the moral prestige of the old order as nothing else had done; and English democracy owes a lasting debt to the eleven martyrs of St. Peter's Fields."

"I am not a philosophic historian. I have no system, no moral interpretation. I write to clear my mind, to discover how things happened and how men behaved. If the result is shocking or provocative, this is not from intent, but solely because I try to judge from the evidence without being influenced by the judgements of others."

"Maxton's failure was more than the failure of a man. It was the failure of a movement – the movement of romantic revolutionary socialism. Keir Hardie, Maxton's predecessor, could combine romance and reality... Revolutionary Socialism turned into the Bolshevik dictatorship; parliamentary Socialism achieved the practical gains of the Welfare State. There was no third way between Lenin and Arthur Henderson."