In the early days of BBC television there was a charming, malicious story about a university professor who was asked to appear on one of the Beeb's discussion programmes. When he was told that there would be a fee of £20, he inquired politely: "Shall I send a cheque?"
Whoever he was, he wasn't A.J.P. Taylor. This extraordinary dynamo of a man, who became the first of the breed described by the tabloids as the "telly don", made so much from his non-academic activities that his university salary rapidly paled into insignificance. He was as well known as any light entertainer, and probably better known than many. An extraordinary table indicates that over a 45-year period he earned an average of about £50,000 a year (in current money terms) from his pen and his tongue. Burk warns that it is only an approximation; but it is probably under rather than over. All of it was necessary: there were two separate families as well as a third wife, fast cars, and fine wines.
Few people, however, begrudged him his rewards, although the academic furrows he ploughed were frequently lonely and combative. He was a controversialist - "a terrible little man, though brilliant", as the literary editor of the Observer once described him - admirably placed to exploit the new medium of television, which placed a high premium on the extraordinary clarity with which he expressed his ideas and his ability to argue complex issues without appearing patronising. His ability to communicate was honed in one unlikely workshop - the Manchester Guardian, as it was then named, whose editor (from 1944) A.P. Wadsworth, massaged his prose style away from "lucid, elegant and long sentences to lucid, short and snappy ones". Journalism, far from swallowing up his academic potential, ended by nourishing it.
As it happened, his vocation was a slightly late one. After leaving Oxford in 1927 he spent no less than seven years exploring a number of blind alleys, one as a trainee solicitor, the other as an inspector of ancient monuments. He was clear enough about his objectives - to help working-class people, and to make enough money in order to live comfortably - but unclear about the means which might help him to achieve them. Kathleen Burk (one of his last research pupils, now a professor herself) points out that there was a dissonance, or at the least the lack of an obvious relationship, between his personal political views and the fields in which he chose to work. A long-time supporter of the Labour Party, he spent much of his life writing about emperors, diplomats and dictators.
These subjects, dry and dusty as they might seem, did not insulate him from controversy. In particular, his book on the origins of the second World War caused an extraordinary outcry, not least by people who, not having read it, assumed too readily that it was soft on Hitler. As an attempt at a balanced assessment of the complexities of European politics in the 1930s it may not have been an unqualified success; but it was a brave challenge to the orthodoxy which maintained that, because Hitler could do no right, his opponents could do no wrong. He was sometimes accused of being an academic rather than a scholar - someone who re-wrote other people's books rather than carrying out original research. To this charge, he replied tellingly that Gibbon and Macalay had been similarly handicapped. His knowledge of German, on the other hand, was a research tool which he was able to use to great effect. Moreover, he had a healthy scepticism. In later life, he was fond of repeating one of the precepts of a professor who tutored him at Oxford: "Do not believe anything merely because it is written down". It is a lesson that bears repetition.
That this biography should appear at all is in itself a bit surprising; it is the second in six years, and Taylor wrote a memoir of his own. On this level, it might appear a book too far, but its publication testifies, at least, to the continuing potential that history and historians have for generating controversy.
Often when history is controversial it is precisely because it tells us something about ourselves that we would rather not hear: when it does this, it performs its best service to the community. And, in a year in which history in our schools is facing a crisis, we need more Taylors, not intellectual ruminants.
John Horgan is Professor of Journalism at Dublin City University. His new biography, Noel Browne: Passionate Outsider, will be published next month