Page "A. J. P. Taylor" Paragraph 27

In public, Taylor declared that he would have never accepted any honour from a government that had " the blood of Suez on its hands ".

In private, he was furious with Trevor-Roper for holding an honour that Taylor considered rightfully his.

Adding to Taylor's rancour was the fact that he had arrived at Oxford a decade before Trevor-Roper.

From then on, Taylor never missed a chance to disparage Trevor-Roper's character or scholarship.

The famously combative Trevor-Roper reciprocated.

The feud was given much publicity by the media, not so much because of the merits of their disputes but rather because their acrimonious debates on television made for entertaining viewing.

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.

Beyond that, it was fashionable to portray the dispute between Taylor and Trevor-Roper as a battle between generations.

Taylor, with his populist, irreverent style, was nearly a decade older than Trevor-Roper, but was represented by the media as a symbol of the younger generation that was coming of age in the 1950s – 1960s.

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.

A subtle but important difference in the style between the two historians was their manner of addressing each other during their TV debates: Trevor-Roper always addressed Taylor as " Mr. Taylor " or just " Taylor ", while Taylor always addressed Trevor-Roper as " Hugh ".