Appeasement, Past and Present.

Nearly a year ago in England A. J. P. Taylor published The Origins of the Second World War. It received a mixed reception. The popular press gave it enthusiastic reviews. The reviewer for the New Statesman, England’s genteel journal of the Left, described Mr. Taylor as “the only English historian now writing who can bend the bow of Gibbon and Macaulay,” and added that his book was “a masterpiece.” The Times Literary Supplement praised its “impeccable logic,” and Mr. Sebastian Haffner in the Observer pronounced it “an almost faultless masterpiece.”

But as the critical appraisal of Mr. Taylor’s work grew, scholarship replaced enthusiasm and the diplomatic historians of the Hitler era found that Mr. Taylor had not only produced no masterpiece but that he was a silly and inaccurate writer who could edit a text, twist a meaning and mislead a reader with the most artful deftness. H. R. Trevor-Roper, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University, writing in Encounter, produced a bill of indictment entitled “A. J. P. Taylor and Hitler,” more devastating and acute than any piece of learned reviewing since the youthful Nietzsche demolished the superficial nonsense of Der Alte und der Neue Glaube by Friedrich David Strauss in 1872. But Trevor-Roper is not alone in his condemnation of this piece of spurious historical writing. Virtually every sound diplomatic historian in England, including the historian of the Rome-Berlin Axis, Elizabeth Wiskemann, has condemned the book as not simply inaccurate and sloppy, but thoroughly misleading.

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Stephen J. Tonsor

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Nearly a year ago in England A. J. P. Taylor published The Origins of the Second World War. It received a mixed reception. The popular press gave it enthusiastic reviews. The reviewer for the New Statesman, England’s genteel journal of the Left, described Mr. Taylor as “the only English historian now writing who can bend the bow of Gibbon and Macaulay,” and added that his book was “a masterpiece.” The Times Literary Supplement praised its “impeccable logic,” and Mr. Sebastian Haffner in the Observer pronounced it “an almost faultless masterpiece.”

But as the critical appraisal of Mr. Taylor’s work grew, scholarship replaced enthusiasm and the diplomatic historians of the Hitler era found that Mr. Taylor had not only produced no masterpiece but that he was a silly and inaccurate writer who could edit a text, twist a meaning and mislead a reader with the most artful deftness. H. R. Trevor-Roper, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University, writing in Encounter, produced a bill of indictment entitled “A. J. P. Taylor and Hitler,” more devastating and acute than any piece of learned reviewing since the youthful Nietzsche demolished the superficial nonsense of Der Alte und der Neue Glaube by Friedrich David Strauss in 1872. But Trevor-Roper is not alone in his condemnation of this piece of spurious historical writing. Virtually every sound diplomatic historian in England, including the historian of the Rome-Berlin Axis, Elizabeth Wiskemann, has condemned the book as not simply inaccurate and sloppy, but thoroughly misleading.