I've been reading A.J.P. Taylor's Origins of the Second World War recently. I could say re-reading, but I've only studied it before, not read it. The difference is substantial. Now, I am reading it cover-to-cover, for pleasure, without taking notes.
The difference is that I am not focussing on his specific opinions on aspects of the inter-war years. I'm not particularly looking for references to the bluff that was Italian foreign policy, or the development of appeasement in British relations with Germany. I'm able to look - and marvel - at the sheer mastery of the subject which Taylor possesses.
By mastery I don't mean his technical knowledge of the facts. What I mean is that Taylor is clearly the master. It is his subject. He is the daddy.
He is expressing an analysis of the inter-war years that is at variance with just about everyone who went before him. It is radical, and even dangerous. It would have seen him imprisoned in 1950's West Germany and far worse in the Soviet Union or its satellites. He spreads the blame amongst all the participants, with the French emerging particularly badly. Hitler, in foreign affairs, is shown to be just another German, in a post-Bismarck line stretching to Stresemann.
And he is creating this largely from wholecloth. There are hardly any footnotes and references: probably a dozen in the first hundred pages (I don't have my copy here). What footnotes there are are cite primary sources (minutes of meetings, telegrams etc.), and not other textbooks. One reference (in the main body text) to Trevor-Roper and Bullock is little more than a disinterested slap-down. To me, this lack of footnotes says several things:
- Taylor is writing something that nobody has adequately stated before. There is nobody to cite in support.
- He doesn't suffer from the urgent desire to prove his learned nature with seven or eight references per page to his wide reading. He cares more about clarity.
- Taylor really doesn't feel he has to show that he is in agreement with others. He is right, and he knows it.
These attitudes shine through in the generality of the text. It's wonderful writing: footsure and confident. He expresses his opinion, he tells you why he is right, and he moves on. Best of all, he hasn't been infected with the French disease of tortured, post-modernist language that would begin to arrive within about fifteen years. Depressingly few academic (as opposed to popular) historians today would have the confidence (even, perhaps, the ability) to write the same sort of study without writing in Academish: a twisted form of English that demonstrates just how erudite the writer his through the use of horribly broken lanugage that would restrict me to calling it "problematic". I can't help but think that Levi-Strauss planned it that way: "you Eeenglish ruined our beaches een 1944, and now we will ruin ze Eeenglish language".