Arnold J. Toynbee

Arnold J. Toynbee taught at London and worked for the Foreign Office in both wars, and between 1934 and 1961 published the twelve volumes of A Study of History, comparing twenty-one civilisations to find the pattern of their rise through challenge and response and their fall through the failure of creative minorities. Somervell’s abridgement made him, for a decade after 1946, the most read historian in the English-speaking world, and Civilization on Trial the essays that put the ideas to the public. The profession never accepted him, and the argument about whether his pattern was discovery or imposition has not ended.