Arnold J. Toynbee

British · 1889 to 1975

Arnold Joseph Toynbee was born on April 14, 1889, in London. He was educated at Winchester College and then Balliol College, Oxford, where he took a First in Classics. A severe bout of amoebic dysentery caught on a walking tour of Greece left him permanently unfit for military service, so he spent the First World War in Foreign Office intelligence work rather than in uniform. He served as a delegate to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, then held the Koraes Chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History at King's College London before joining, in 1925, the London School of Economics as Research Professor of International History. The same year he became Director of Studies at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House, a post he held for thirty years while directing its wartime Foreign Research and Press Service. From 1934 he built A Study of History, a twelve-volume comparative account of the rise and fall of civilizations organized around the ideas of challenge and response and the creative minority, published a volume or several at a time until the final volume appeared in 1961. The project made him, through the 1940s and 1950s, one of the most widely read historians alive, his face on the cover of Time magazine in 1947. He married Rosalind Murray, daughter of the classicist Gilbert Murray, in 1913; they divorced in 1946, and he married his longtime research collaborator on A Study of History, Veronica Boulter, that same year. His son Philip Toynbee became a novelist and literary critic. Toynbee died in York, England, on October 22, 1975, at the age of eighty-six, having published across six decades hundreds of books, pamphlets and articles on history, religion and international affairs.