Troublemaker: The Life and History of A.J.P. Taylor By Kathleen Burk, Yale, $ 35 'Extreme views weakly held' was A.J.P. Taylor's response when he was asked about his strong political views in his first job interview at Corpus Christi, Oxford. Taylor was then only 29 years old. But that reply could serve as an apposite description of his life. A man of extremes, he loved to provoke and was himself easily provoked. He stated his views with brio and changed them frequently. He was the best known historian of his generation but did not earn for himself the respect of his peers. He was a serious academic who became famous as a television personality. He was rich but beset all his life with financial worries. He craved love and affection but failed to cling to them for very long. He loved teasing out historical paradoxes and lived out many in his life. This is an extremely well researched and written biography of the historian by his last research student. It complements, and in terms of the details unearthed, is an improvement upon Adam Sisman's A.J.P.Taylor: A Biography which was published in 1994. The very fact that two biographies have appeared within ten years of his death is testimony to the public attention and popularity that Taylor continues to command. Taylor grew up near Manchester, the only son of affluent but left-wing parents. He went to Bootham School in York and then as a scholarship boy to Oriel College, Oxford. Oxford in the Twenties was the arcadia so unforgettably evoked in Evelyn Waugh's Bride- shead Revisited. 'Blow it up after I have gone down' was Taylor's comm- ent on Oxford while he was a student there. It sums up his love-hate relatio- nship with the place and his contrariness. Oxford lay deep in his heart and he craved the university's recognition. He never overcame his bitterness at being passed over, through a shrewd piece of intrigue and networking, for the Regius Professorship and his greatest joy came when he was asked to give the Ford lectures. Taylor was a dedicated teacher. He was a conscientious tutor at Magdalen College, Oxford and his lectures, always delivered at the unearthly hour of nine in the morning, were always full. But his real fame rested on his books and reviews. He produced, his biographer writes, 'on an average two books of solid worth each decade for forty years' and one review every week. He was prolific, but many of his books were not based on archival research but on printed sources. More than the research and the history, Taylor once confessed that he found writing more interesting. It was this, and a dash of envy, which made other professional historians dismiss Taylor as too smart and glib and too superficial and journalistic. Taylor's coruscating prose makes it impossible to put down his books. He believed in writing narrative and excelled in it. Short one-verb sentences expressing opinions that pleased no one and surprised all were trademarks of the Taylor style. Here is an oft-quoted example: '1848 recapitulated Germany's past and inspired Germany's future...Nev- er before has there been a revolution so inspired by a limitless faith in the power of ideas: never has a revolution so discredited the power of ideas in its result. The success of the revolution discredited conservative ideas; the failure of the revolution discredited liberal ideas. German history reached its turning-point and failed to turn. This was the fateful essence of 1848.' The pairing of opposites is vintage Taylor. But there was more to him than his style. He showed the importance of power in diplomacy and brought out in narrative the interaction between structure (profound forces) and event (accident or human agency). He dared to defy conventions and wrote diplomatic and political history when social and economic history were becoming fashionable. He was a troublemaker among historians and his own favourite book was The Troublemakers: Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1792-1939. But no other mischief-mak- er did his work in such limpid prose.