AJP Taylor's 'What I Read This Year' lists

Featuring Dylan Thomas, Agatha Christie, and, well, Alan John Percivale Taylor

AJP Taylor’s name will ring few bells for the younger generation but for us slightly more mature folks he was a remarkable historian, giving remarkable lectures on television without notes, and paving the way for the likes of other media-friendly historians such as Michael Wood and Lucy Worsley (though with fewer changes of outfit).

I’ve always felt something of a kinship with him as he went to my Quaker school Bootham where he was apparently an excellent Puck in an outdoor production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and in a non-conformist move typical of both him and the school was the place where he stopped believing in God. Like him, I also went up to Oxford to study history, though that’s about where the comparison ends, although we did both write lots of books. I never met him, though I did try and snag an invitation to his funeral, unsuccessfully. Apparently, as a lecturer he would stop wherever he’d got to when his hour was up, then pick up the following week from exactly the same spot, so undergraduates had to be on their toes.

Magdalen College, where he studied, has just put up an excellent little online exhibition about him [click link to nip across] and fellow historian K. B. McFarlane (not a Bootham old boy, poor chap). Among the interesting items on display is his notebook - a detail of which is pictured at the top of this newsletter - containing everything he read over several decades, including his own classic The Course of German History.

It’s well worth a little snoop since he read loads and quite eclectically. So you’ve got big hitters like The Canterbury Tales, Sense and Sensibility, Dr Zhivago, and various bits of Dickens (Pickwick Papers, Martin Chuzzlewitt, Bleak House).

But also on the list is a lorry load of Agatha Christie (A Pocketful of Rye, Cards on the Table, Murder in the Mews, Death on the Nile) and P.G. Wodehouse (Quick Service, Laughing Gas, Spring Fever), detective fiction (Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man, and The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler), a bit of poetry (including John Betjeman and Dylan Thomas, the latter s a friend of his first wife though Alan himself felt DT downed too much beer).

Cheeringly, there’s also Treasure Island, The Hobbit, James Thurber’s My Life and Hard Times, and - perhaps best of all - The Tailor of Gloucester by Beatrix Potter.

If lists of book lists are your thing, I shall be so bold as to suggest you will enjoy my book A Book of Book Lists published by the British Library, and positively enjoyed by - among many others - the TLS which called it “not merely a book of book lists, it suggests how we read, and why”.