Wealth & Money Quote by A. J. P. Taylor

Taylor’s line lands like a pint glass slid too hard across the bar: funny on impact, unsettling once it stops moving. “Only there for the beer” is deliberately anti-heroic phrasing, a pub joke smuggled into the sanctum of “great men” history. He’s not literally accusing emperors and prime ministers of chasing lager; he’s puncturing the pious habit of retroactively laundering ambition into destiny. Beer stands in for appetite: the ordinary, bodily motives that polite historiography likes to edit out.

The subtext is a warning about how power gets narrated. When we canonize leaders as visionaries, we risk mistaking their self-justifications for their real incentives. Taylor’s add-on clause - “the wealth, prestige and grandeur that went with the power” - turns the joke into an argument: the perks are not incidental; they’re the engine. It’s a cramped little theory of history, closer to newsroom cynicism than marble-statue reverence: people reach for office because office confers things humans reliably want.

Context matters: Taylor wrote and spoke in a postwar Britain that had watched “great men” drag continents into catastrophe, then listened to them explain it as necessity. His broader work treated diplomacy and statecraft not as chess played by geniuses but as a messy market of interests, vanity, miscalculation, and momentum. The barb works because it collapses distance. It drags kings and conquerors down to our scale, reminding readers that grandeur is often just self-interest in formal dress - and that treating it otherwise is how myths keep recruiting.