A. J. P. Taylor; Popular British Historian

A. J. P. Taylor, the British scholar, best-selling historian, television raconteur and wry wit who wrote of his final years as a “nuisance,” has died in London. He was 84.

Taylor, who died Friday, had suffered from Parkinson’s disease for the last several years and had been confined to a nursing home for the last two years.

Alan John Percivale Taylor, the son of a Lancashire cotton manufacturer, was credited with making two centuries of European history interesting for his international public. His works included not only textbooks, but also illustrated best-selling volumes on both world wars and other events.

In the 1950s, Taylor gave lively lectures on television for the British Broadcasting Corp. The texts of several were published in the book “Revolutions and Revolutionaries” in 1980.

Illustrating his wit as well as his careful scrutiny of a subject, Taylor published “An Old Man’s Diary,” his 28th book, in 1985. Then 78 and already afflicted with Parkinson’s disease, he dealt amusingly with aging and his diminishing interest in events beyond his own back yard.

He had stopped writing his autobiography because, he noted: “Strictly, I cannot finish it until I am dead and then it will be too late.” The autobiography, “A Personal History,” had been published in 1983.

Although never maudlin, Taylor wrote that he did wish fleetingly for a pill to make death a personal decision, but that any such decision was foreclosed because of his wife.

“For her sake, I suppose I must endure life as long as I can,” he wrote. “Still, it is a great nuisance.”

Exploring a universal quandary of the elderly about how to spend various savings, Taylor mused about the rate at which he was dipping into his stock of claret wine.

“I should look a damned fool if I ran through my reserve before I died,” he said. “But I should look even more foolish if I died with some of my reserve untapped. There is no easy answer.”

Taylor was the consummate observer of his world as well as those that had gone before. “Nuclear-proof residences are being provided underground for the chosen few,” he noted after scrutinizing fallout shelters. “And, of course, those who do the choosing have naturally chosen themselves. There will be the royal family; the prime minister and her colleagues, and the defense chiefs . . . what an extraordinary coincidence. The very people who have led us to the slaughterhouse are to be preserved in the hope of repeating their achievement.”

Looking at politics, he said: “The new session of Parliament is now in full swing or, alternatively, total stagnation. Choose whichever phrase you like; they mean much the same thing.”

He was no more charitable toward the automobile: “A mass of metal is laboriously transported from one place to another. Then it is abandoned for the day, obstructing pedestrians who are attempting a less selfish method of locomotion.”

Taylor was educated at Oxford University and later taught modern history there and at Manchester University.