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“... work provides yet more evidence of the phenomenal energy and wide range of information of the late Arnold Toynbee. He returns to a question which had interested him from the start of his career, and in order to appreciate the application to it of his mature method, a summary of that career is needed. It can be given with the help of the obituary notice ...”

“... to the ranks of those who have achieved some form of cultural or intellectual distinction. Polly Toynbee, well known as a journalist and columnist for the Observer, the BBC and the Guardian, is a representative of one such clan, and in An Uneasy Inheritance she melds entertaining accounts of her most notable recent ancestors into ‘a particular history of a ...”

“... currently selling 1,500,000 copies. For the editors, as they put it, ‘the story of Historian Toynbee and his work in progress was an unusual challenge and opportunity.’ The response was ‘overwhelming’, and not only from ‘professors of history, philosophy and anthropology, from deans of American colleges and universities, heads of public and ...”

“... it was ‘a wilderness of tigers’. While at Chatham House, Hourani came under the influence of Arnold Toynbee, the historian of the rise and fall of civilisations. Kedourie, on the other hand, despised Chatham House’s penchant for liberal hand-wringing, as well as what he perceived as the institution’s readiness to fudge unpleasant realities about ...”

“... and published evidence of their wrong-doing. James Bryce, who together with the young historian Arnold Toynbee was responsible for the dossier submitted to Edward Grey, was a Gladstonian Liberal with an interest in the Armenians – and a contempt for Turkish rule – which stretched back forty years. Bryce and ...”

“... And that is the trouble. Tainter freely admits that he is trying to do the same sort of thing as Arnold Toynbee attempted in his 12-volume Study of History or Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West, but on a very reduced scale – just 215 pages. I am puzzled as to why the practice of archaeology should lead its practitioners into fantasies of this ...”

“... book possesses all the ingredients of a cult book, like the much-criticised Study of History by Arnold Toynbee, some thirty years ago. As a dollar-earner, we were told at the time, Toynbee’s opus ranked second only to whisky. Perhaps, one day, Braudel’s writings will stand in the export figures beside butter and ...”

“... sent to find out about, and declined, human response triumphing over journalistic instinct. It was Arnold Toynbee who set her on her course as a newspaperwoman (‘the way to stop war was to study the possible causes on the spot and the best way to do that was to work as the foreign correspondent of an influential newspaper’). She tried the Times, and ...”

“... of Homo leucodermaticus whose pet name (given him by Nietzsche) is the ‘Blond Beast’. Thus Arnold Toynbee in the opening volume of his magisterial (and misguided) Study of History (1933). Toynbee sought to explain why civilisations rise and fall, but before he could do so he had to deal with the theorists of the ...”

“... careers. H.W. Stubbs of Charterhouse went on to teach classics at the University of Exeter. Philip Toynbee was expelled from Rugby, but then handed over to the monks of Ampleforth to be crammed, successfully, for a history scholarship to Oxford. John Peet ended up as head of the Reuters bureau in Berlin, before defecting to the East in 1950. Gavin Ewart, whose ...”

“... historical writing can somehow be disconnected from the point of view of the historian. It was Arnold Toynbee in A Study of History, not some modern Afrocentrist, who urged scholars to abandon the parochial idea that ‘Western Society’s history’ was equivalent to “ ‘History” writ large.’ Perhaps most important, today’s proponents of ...”

“... not adopt. His book is explicitly anthropocentric – he distances himself from the approach of Arnold Toynbee in ‘The Roman Revolution from the Flora’s Point of View’, where speaking roles were given to plants. By implication, at least, he would also reject the injunction of the American environmental historian Donald Worster that we learn to ...”

“... Philip Noel-Baker, George Orwell, Lord Arthur Ponsonby, Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, Arnold Toynbee, the Webbs, H.G. Wells or Leonard and Virginia Woolf? Unless clearly backed by an important publishing house or journal, as with Victor Gollancz or Kingsley Martin’s New Statesman, or an actual mass organisation like Lord Robert Cecil’s ...”

“... rays of a sunrise upthrown from below its horizon but halted there. One reason at least for what Arnold Toynbee called this aborted Celtic civilisation must have been social. All our life-ways remained for far too long based on social structures dependent on the primitive idea of the local Ruler, while Europe was developing the more powerful concept of ...”

“... his usual criteria for making judgments and urges us to do the same. ‘Right and wrong,’ Arnold Toynbee wrote, ‘are the same in Palestine as anywhere else. What is peculiar about the Palestine conflict is that the world has listened to the party that has committed the offence and has turned a deaf ear to the victims.’ For Dr O’Brien, right ...”