Constance was a suffragette, feminist, and advocate of free love who practised her teachings via a string of extramarital affairs, most notably with Henry Sara, a communist who in many ways became Taylor's surrogate father.

Taylor himself was recruited into the Communist Party of Great Britain by a friend of the family, the military historian Tom Wintringham, while at Oriel; a member from 1924 to 1926.

[13] Taylor wrote that because Beneš was a President, "he was not allowed to brave the front line in London and had to live in a sovereign state at Aston Abbotts – a Rothschild house of, for them, a modest standard.

[14] Taylor argued that the Czechoslovaks would have to "explain" democracy to the Soviets and "explain" socialism to the British, saying: "You must appear to the English people as communists and to the Russians as democrats and therefore receive nothing, but abuse from both sides[14] Czechoslovakia's Place in a Free Europe reflected Beneš's theory of "convergence" as he felt based on what he was seeing in wartime Britain that the western nations would become socialist after the war while the Soviet Union would become more democratic.

"[18] In the book Taylor argued against the widespread belief that the outbreak of the Second World War (specifically between Germany, Poland, the United Kingdom and France, September 1939) was the result of an intentional plan on the part of Adolf Hitler.

He began his book with the statement that too many people have accepted uncritically what he called the "Nuremberg Thesis", that the Second World War was the result of criminal conspiracy by a small gang comprising Hitler and his associates.

He was fond of stressing his nonconformist Northern English background and saw himself as part of a grand tradition of radical dissent that he regarded as the real glorious history of England.

Instead, he argued that all of the great powers believed that if they possessed the ability to mobilise their armed forces faster than any of the others, this would serve as a sufficient deterrent to avoid war and allow them to achieve their foreign policy aims.

Beside Lord Beaverbrook, whose company Taylor very much enjoyed, his favourite politician was the Labour Party leader Michael Foot, whom he often described as the greatest Prime Minister Britain never had.

[citation needed] Taylor also wrote significant introductions to British editions of Marx's The Communist Manifesto and of Ten Days that Shook the World, by John Reed.

In 1963, the British Communist Party, which held the copyright to Ten Days that Shook the World in the United Kingdom, offered Taylor the opportunity to write the introduction to a new edition.

[19] After leaving the Sunday Pictorial in 1952, in the wake of editor Philip Zec's dismissal, he began writing a weekly column the following year for the Daily Herald until 1956.

Likewise, the various articles written by Taylor and Trevor-Roper denouncing each other's scholarship, in which both men's considerable powers of invective were employed with maximum effect, made for entertaining reading.

Trevor-Roper, who was unabashedly old-fashioned (he was one of the last Oxford dons to lecture wearing his professor's robes) and inclined to behave in a manner that the media portrayed as pompous and conceited, was seen as a symbol of the older generation.

[citation needed] He featured in a cameo in the 1981 film Time Bandits and was satirised in an episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus, in which a scantily clad woman (identified by an onscreen caption as "A. J. P. Taylor, Historian"), dubbed over with a man's voice, delivers a lecture on "Eighteenth Century Social Reform".

However, after 1936, he resigned from the Manchester Peace Council, urged British rearmament in the face of what Taylor considered to be the Nazi menace, and advocated an Anglo-Soviet alliance to contain Germany.

He denounced the Munich Agreement and those who supported it, warning the assembled dons that if action were not taken immediately to resist Nazi Germany, then they might all soon be living under the rule of a much greater tyrant than James II.

As a socialist, Taylor saw the capitalist system as wrong on practical and moral grounds, although he rejected the Marxist view that capitalism was responsible for wars and conflicts.

In 1956 Taylor demonstrated against the Suez War, though not the Soviet crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, which he believed had saved Hungary from a return to the rule of Admiral Miklós Horthy.

Closer to his work as a historian, Taylor espoused less government secrecy and, paradoxically for a staunch leftist, fought for more privately owned television stations.

[31] Though Taylor normally preferred to portray leaders as fools blundering their way forward, he did think that individuals sometimes could play a positive role in history; his heroes were Vladimir Lenin and David Lloyd George.

Despite Taylor's increasing ambivalence toward appeasement from the late 1950s, which became explicitly evident in his 1961 book Origins of the Second World War, Winston Churchill remained another of his heroes.

On 29 August 1953, in reviewing a biography of William Cobbett in New Statesman, Taylor wrote "The Establishment draws in recruits from outside as soon as they are ready to conform to its standards and become respectable.

The article caused a member of the public to lodge a complaint with the Press Council, on the grounds that Taylor's remarks "amount[ed] to an indirect incitement to drivers to break the law".

Other historians who criticised The Origins of the Second World War included: Isaac Deutscher, Barbara Tuchman, Ian Morrow, Gerhard Weinberg, Elizabeth Wiskemann, W. N. Medlicott, Tim Mason, John Lukacs, Karl Dietrich Bracher, Frank Freidel, Harry Hinsley, John Wheeler-Bennett, Golo Mann, Lucy Dawidowicz, Gordon A. Craig, A. L. Rowse, Raymond Sontag, Andreas Hillgruber and Yehuda Bauer.

Taylor was angered by some of the criticism, especially the implication that he had set out to exonerate Hitler, writing that "to the best of my recollection, those who now display indignation against me were not active [against appeasement] on the public platform".

The issue of misinterpretation is also addressed in Gordon A. Craig's book Germany: 1866–1945, where it is argued that Taylor dismissed Hitler's foreign policy, as presented in Mein Kampf, and in particular, the remilitarisation of the Rhineland, as a jumble of idle thoughts written down under the impact of the French occupation of the Ruhr.

Recently, a number of specialists in Italian history have challenged this by arguing that Mussolini possessed a belief in the spazio vitale (vital space) as a guiding foreign policy concept in which the entire Mediterranean, the Balkans, the Middle East and the Horn of Africa were regarded as rightfully belonging to Italy, leading to inevitable conflict with the two dominant Mediterranean powers, Britain and France.

In particular, advocates of the La décadence concept have asserted that inter-war France was riven by political instability; possessed a leadership that was deeply divided, corrupt, incompetent and pusillanimous, which ruled over a nation rent by mass unemployment, strikes, a sense of despair over the future, riots and a state of near-civil war between the Left and the Right.

He had, with considerable difficulty, memorised a short speech, which he delivered in a manner that managed to hide the fact that his memory and mind had been permanently damaged by Parkinson's.