R. A. C. Parker

Robert Alexander Clarke Parker, historian: born Barnsley, Yorkshire, 15 June 1927; Lecturer in History, Manchester University 1952-57; Fellow in Modern History, Queen's College, Oxford 1957-94 (Emeritus); married 1961 Julia Dixon (two daughters); died Oxford 23 April 2001.

Robert Alexander Clarke Parker, historian: born Barnsley, Yorkshire, 15 June 1927; Lecturer in History, Manchester University 1952-57; Fellow in Modern History, Queen's College, Oxford 1957-94 (Emeritus); married 1961 Julia Dixon (two daughters); died Oxford 23 April 2001.

R. A. C. Parker, historian of appeasement and the Second World War, was a man of style, combining a belief in the politics of equality and membership of the Labour Party with an affection for country-house living, collegiate rituals, buying pictures, sports cars, and horse-racing.

He was a handsome and rather dashing figure, attracted by women and attractive to them. Radical in his politics, he was conservative in his way of life. However, his political loyalties, which lay, as he often told me, with Old Labour, were not lightly held. Unlike many left-wing academics of his generation, he and his wife, Julia, sent their children to the local state schools.

He was born in Yorkshire in 1927 and christened Robert Alexander Clarke, but was known all his life as Alastair. It was, he told me, only much later that he discovered with some sense of shock that this was not his real name. He was educated at Barnsley Grammar School and won an open scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford. He came up first as a naval cadet and then, after war service, as an undergraduate to read Modern History. Predictably, in 1950, he won a First.

He then embarked on research, under H.J. Habakkuk, into the agrarian revolution of the 18th century, concentrating upon the innovations of Coke of Norfolk. Two years later he became an assistant lecturer in history at Manchester University. The contrast between the worlds of Manchester, where he taught, and of Holkham, where he worked on the archives, gave him some pleasure. By the time he had finished his thesis his interests were shifting from agriculture to the controversial ground of diplomatic history. The thesis, completed in the Fifties, was only published in 1975, as Coke of Norfolk: a financial and agricultural study.

In 1957 Parker was elected to a fellowship in Modern History at Queen's College, Oxford, and spent the next 37 years as a college tutor, with a growing reputation in Britain, Germany and America as a 20th- century historian. In 1961 he married Julia Dixon, a lecturer in Sociology at Oxford University.

He gave tutorials on early modern British history, 19th and 20th-century Europe, and his pièce de résistance, a special subject on "British policy and the origins of the Second World War", a part of the syllabus that he devised and tightly controlled. He was much in demand from other college tutors to take on their pupils, who reported enthusiastically on his tutorials. He pushed them into asking questions that went behind the easy generalities of the textbooks.

In the special subject pupils were forced to work mainly from the original documents, since there were at the start few secondary authorities ­ a great advantage, as he pointed out. He gave pupils clear guidance on books and lectures: on which were worthwhile and which were not. He was also a generous host, laying on lavish parties for undergraduates and dons.

His first book, Europe 1919-45, was first published in German translation by Fischer Bücherei in 1967 as part of the Fischer Weltgeschichte, and in English two years later. Concentrating upon high politics, he sweeps over the political affairs, especially the diplomatic relations, of western Europe. The book ends sombrely:

The historical significance of Nazi rule is . . . that it demonstrated the depths to which civilised human beings can sink. Humanity's view of itself will never be the same again.

By now, the Wilson government had reduced the period during which official documents were closed from 50 years to 30, making possible a much more scholarly investigation of the origins of the Second World War and of the war itself. Parker took full advantage of this. He presented his conclusions first in a series of masterly articles, mostly in the English Historical Review. He then, between 1989 and 2000, brought out three major books. The first, The Struggle for Survival: the history of the Second World War (1989), is one of the very best accounts of those terrible events. It is marked by an acute eye for essentials and by incisive judgements.

The second, Chamberlain and Appeasement: British policy and the coming of the Second World War (1993), is probably the most important, in scholarly terms, of his books. It was written when historians were beginning to take a much more favourable view of Chamberlain's policies than before. His policies were presented as the "best, or perhaps the only, policy towards Germany that circumstances allowed".

Against this, Parker presents a far subtler picture. Chamberlain was "neither ignorant nor idle"; he was a cultivated and intelligent man; appeasement was "not a feeble policy of surrender and unlimited retreat". But the policy did end in disaster and there were alternative roads down which Britain could have gone. Chamberlain's obstinacy prevented them from being taken. Some of those roads are mapped out in Parker's final book, Churchill and Appeasement (2000).

Alastair Parker's writings are models of the historian's art. They are based upon scrupulous research, are economical, lucid and crisp, and they engage the reader's full attention. His judgements are finely nuanced but never flabby or opaque. In the 10 years before he died he reached the peak of his development and he had plenty of ideas for the future.

Penry Williams