TAC Bookshelf: On Rereading A.J.P. Taylor

A.J.P. Taylor is the last truly great historian, writing in the King’s language, doing history as history was supposed to be, but for the classes as well as the masses.

Grand History is a declining area of interest in a discipline determined to self-destruct by laser-focus on pedantic minutiae of irrelevant human interest nonsense, writes Sumantra Maitra .

Many monasteries were dissolved; Protestants and Jews were freed of their disabilities; and the Church , deprived of its privileged position, was put under a state control.

Secular thought could at last begin to stir; the embers of Protestantism revived in Bohemia ; and, by freeing the Jews , Joseph II called into existence the most loyal of Austrians .

An impartial judge would have found little fault with the territorial settlement once the principle of national states was accepted.