A. J. P. Taylor
Oxford years

He became a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1938, a post he held until 1976. He was also a lecturer in modern history at the University of Oxford from 1938 to 1963. At Oxford he was such a popular speaker that he had to give his lectures at 8:30 a.m. to avoid the room becoming over-crowded.

In 1962, Taylor wrote in a review of The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845–1849 by Cecil Woodham-Smith that: "All Ireland was a Belsen.... The English governing class ran true to form. They had killed two million Irish people." Taylor added that if the death rate from the Great Famine was not higher it "was not for want of trying" on the part of the British government, quoting Benjamin Jowett, the Master of Balliol College: "I have always felt a certain horror of political economists since I heard one of them say that the Famine in Ireland would not kill more than a million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do much good." Taylor later reprinted his book review under the stark title "Genocide" in his 1976 book Essays in English History."

In 1964, whilst he retained his college fellowship, the University of Oxford declined to renew Taylor's appointment as a university lecturer in modern history. This apparently sudden decision came in the aftermath of the controversy around his book The Origins of the Second World War. Moving to London, he became a lecturer at the Institute of Historical Research at University College London and at the Polytechnic of North London.

An important step in Taylor's "rehabilitation" was a festschrift organised in his honour by Martin Gilbert in 1965. He was honoured with two more festschriften, in 1976 and 1986. The festschriften were testaments to his popularity with his former students as receiving even a single festschrift is considered to be an extraordinary and rare honour.
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