We don’t have in this country an academic who may be said to seriously rival as a celebrity the British author of A Personal History. A. J. P. Taylor’s scholarship over half a century is formidable: close to thirty solid works in international history and biography, some eminently controversial, but none, I believe, charged with either superficiality or ineptitude. He has household status in his country as a newspaper columnist dealing with up-to-the-minute political and diplomatic affairs; and he is as widely known a television figure as anyone in England. Finally, he has a cultivated sense of the outrageous, both in his university and media roles. “Extreme views weakly held” is his description of his politics.

In the preface to A Personal History, Taylor informs us that the book might have been more interesting were it not for the libel law in Great Britain, which by American standards is strict. The legal counsel for his publisher found seventy-six characterizations of the living in the manuscript that encroached upon the libelous. “To say a man was a conscientious objector is libellous; to say that he was or worse still is a communist is libellous; to say that I wrote a critical review of an historical work is libellous of the author even if the work deserved my criticism.” But let the reader worry not. “There is one way out. If the person allegedly libelled is dead, all is well. How eagerly I have gone through the obituaries