"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."
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Historians from EnglandActivists from EnglandSocialists from EnglandUniversity of Oxford facultyJournalists from England
Original Language: English
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Sources
Tony Judt, in Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century (2012), Chap. 7 : Unities and Fragments: European Historian
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/A._J._P._Taylor
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A. J. P. Taylor
Alan John Percivale Taylor (25 March 1906 – 7 September 1990) was a British historian, journalist, broadcaster and scholar. His approachably written and sometimes contentiously revisionist studies of 19th and early 20th-century subjects brought academic history to a new audience.
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