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“... but he usually pays for it by not being able to write naturally himself. It seems likely that Philip Toynbee would have given anything to be a real novelist and a real poet, but in his ‘experimental’ novels – Tea with Mrs Goodman and The Garden to the Sea – and in the gargantuan poem Pantaloon which occupied him for so many years, the words ...”

“... man, so that his sins simply fall away from him, to be replaced by present joy and future hope.’ Philip Toynbee introduces Part of a Journey with a Which-type survey of the various concepts, and consequent terminology, of religious conversion, at one point making it sound like the best china (‘ “Rebirth” should be kept for very special ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... historian and writer for children, has been singled out for praise by critics as diverse as Philip Toynbee, Francis King, Angus Wilson and Andrew Sinclair. All feel that he lacks the large audience he deserves. Yet the curious reader, anxious to gain more information about this somewhat enigmatic writer, of undoubted power (and above all ...”

“... to America, which has been fashionable ever since Stephen Spender’s Love-Hate Relations. Philip Toynbee, in the Observer, came right out with it: ‘by now it is hard to see any reason why an American writer or artist should wish to settle either in Paris or London.’ Then, of course, it was another matter. James, Whistler, Sargent, Mark ...”

“... their 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 ...”

“... His thought is agile and strong and it is always expressed with perfect economy and lucidity. Philip Toynbee once compared him to the master of a gymnasium, lithe, elegant and ready to take on all comers: one by one, the great problems of philosophy advanced on him like Sumo wrestlers, only to be laid flat by a flick of the wrist. That fits ...”

“... Richard Crossman for his ‘moral laziness and hypocrisy’, exposing the bogus proletarianism of Philip Toynbee and William Beveridge’s remoteness from the lives of the people whose social welfare he is planning. Later he courts, but sees through, Harold Laski and Victor Gollancz. He takes tea with the Master of Balliol, sails expensive boats, gets on ...”

“... Although I was Philip Toynbee’s exact contemporary, I did not know him all that well: but I was always struck by the quite exceptional devotion of those who did. They found him lovable; and when he and Ben Nicolson founded a luncheon club they flocked to it. He was affectionate and generous, marvellously funny but convinced that the world in which he lived was insufferable and that he must do what he could to save it ...”

“... they swung along they sang the ‘Internationale’. Jean was proud of knowing all the verses, but Philip Toynbee ‘could be heard intoning his own version of the advertisement for Horlicks Malted Milk: “Masturbation not Night Starvation’”. In fact, the Communist Party version was ‘Masturbation not Mass Starvation’. The MacGibbons assumed that ...”

“... grander, the pleasures of the town, not least dancing and seduction (‘great fun,’ as he and Philip Toynbee agreed). And of course there was Tottenham Hotspur, and Ayer was a pioneer intellectual football fan. However, in 1959 he applied for and got the Wykeham Chair of Logic and went back to Oxford, a place he professed not to like. He was nearly ...”

“... by discussing the reception of The Lord of the Rings. The critical judgments of reviewers such as Philip Toynbee and Edmund Wilson are explained by the animosity generated by the Oxford English School’s old and false distinction between Language and Literature. Tolkien had little time for literary critics, although literary criticism was an activity ...”

“... as merely absurd.’ He spoke, feelingly, of his sense of belonging to a ‘lost world’. Philip Toynbee, reviewing the book, concluded that Chandos had not understood the war he had fought in. But for all the dramas of wartime and the high political world, it is this collision of the guardsmen with the world of the 1960s which strikes the ...”

“... Salman Rushdie’? Like it or not, the joke is pure Mitford (as was Decca’s voice, described by Philip Toynbee as ‘a curiously cadenced sing-song which would have been grotesquely affected had it not been even more grotesquely natural’). Decca’s moral courage is present also, less appetisingly, in Diana, whom Lovell never quite pins down ...”

“... but their fears of becoming the dupes of a sinister literary plot now seem exaggerated. Philip Toynbee, for example, who declared that he had never really been taken in for a minute, his scepticism having been awakened early on by the frontispiece (you can’t get much earlier in a book than its frontispiece), obviously had been taken in and ...”