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“... the help of the obituary notice contributed to the Proceedings of the British Academy for 1977 by William McNeill, an American scholar who has a close affinity with his subject. Toynbee was born in 1889 into a family with Evangelical associations; like the celebrated uncle he was named after, his father was a social worker. At Winchester he was trained ...”

“... Professor McNeill’s little book, The Human Condition, is in the genre of most of his other works – an attempt to grasp the grand sweep of history. Originally delivered as the Brand-Lee Lectures at Clark University, the book is an abstract of ideas developed in his earlier works, in particular Plagues and People (1977 ...”

“... which marginalised his major project in the eyes of his own profession. As his new biographer, William McNeill, candidly declares, ‘a principal purpose of this book is to try to establish a better balance between the popular adulation on the one hand and the professional hostility on the other that closed in on Toynbee after the ...”

“... of states but also in national and imperial economies both ancient and modern. Like Professor William McNeill of Chicago, whose influence he acknowledges, he is good both on the logistic and fiscal details and on the broader relationships between the aims of rulers and the geopolitical context in which they are pursued. Nor is any of this simply an ...”

“... ghettos surrounding the University, a development long in the making, but not easily averted, as McNeill carefully explains. But there is a positive Hutchins legacy. He had always shown a flair for attracting public attention. His advocacy of Adler’s ‘great books’ education kept alive the idea of an educational canon based on the significant texts of ...”

“... is preserved, the great ‘breaking wave’ of cumulative globalisation need not be disastrous, as William McNeill and J.R. McNeill show in The Human Web (2003). Surfers of the wave will, however, have to hold to ‘face-to-face, primary communities for long-range survival: communities, like those our predecessors ...”

“... not met by her life with an obsessively productive and socially awkward scholar, but after reading William McNeill’s biography of Arnold Toynbee one begins to develop a little sympathy for this imperious, passionate, frustrated woman. Having divorced Toynbee, she initially took up with a man fifteen years younger than herself in what was assumed, at ...”

“... about the painter Whistler which catches at one’s imagination. It concerns his draughtsmanship. William Rothenstein recalls Whistler talking to him contemptuously of Oscar Wilde’s house in Tite Street and doing him a little drawing of it, to illustrate the monotony of such a terrace house. ‘I noticed then,’ says Rothenstein, ‘how childishly Whistler ...”

“... ways. Edna Waugh had been spotted at the age of 14 by a friend of her father, a barrister called William Clarke Hall, who urged him to send her to art school. By the time she was 16 Hall was ‘determined’ to marry her and she and Ida were in fraught correspondence about what to do. Ida sensibly argued with both parties that Edna was simply too young to ...”

“... the Mississippi and Lake Champlain. Scotland’s great contribution came from the engineer William Symington, whose paddle steamer Charlotte Dundas, built in 1801, was a mechanical triumph let down in the end by his nervous backers (though it encouraged the later schemes of Fulton and Bell). Compared with Symington, Bell was the lesser engineer and the ...”

“... Born in Britain of English Mothers and Coloured Americans, an LCP report from 1946, Sylvia McNeill estimated that up to half of the women who had ‘brown babies’ were already married to white British men serving overseas. According to Alma LaBadie, speaking at the Pan-African Congress in Manchester in 1945, the ‘condition of forgiveness’ was ...”