This blog is about

Letting air into the longest book in the English language, and some of its companions, via extracts.

With a few digressions – and apologies to Ray Bradbury for the title.

• Contact

I live in London, am not a historian, and can be reached via Comments and at david derrick one word [at] yahoo [dot] com.

• Layout and copyright

This is a page. Pages are listed top left. Normal entries are called posts.

Toynbee’s words, printed or otherwise recorded, are not indented. Nor is any other text from his books, except long quotations; those are indented but not greyed.

My words, and everything I quote that isn’t Toynbee, are indented and greyed. Greyed passages are usually ideas or facts or interpretations which I contribute, not summaries of omitted passages by Toynbee. The titles of posts do not normally quote Toynbee.

The book or other material by Toynbee from which I have quoted is identified at the end of a post, after my own commentary.

All posts and pages are works in progress. Feeds sometimes don’t present the latest version of a post.

Please do not quote material by Toynbee which is not in the public domain without permission from the copyright holder. Material written by me is copyright.

• The Study

Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History was published between 1934 and 1961.

There are ten volumes in the main series, an Historical Atlas and Gazetteer, done with Edward D Myers, and a twelfth volume, answering his critics, called Reconsiderations.

(My set – second editions of the first three volumes, first of the rest – has 7,315 pages.)

Noel Annan, Manchester Guardian Weekly, October 21 1954:

“How fortunate for us that A Study of History, one of the most striking analyses of life in our times, has been written by a man of such humanity and wisdom and with such a passion for inquiry. Today one feeling for his thirty years’ labour must predominate. Admiration for an achievement which has made his name a household word and history something new and exciting to countless people who needed a wider horizon than the old European landscape. Admiration for the tenacity in completing a task from which he has not permitted war or private troubles to deflect him. Admiration for his humanism, for his sympathy for ages and peoples long departed from this earth, and for his magnificent feat of synthesizing such diverse and intractable material. The scholar’s calling is, after all, to create order where none before existed; and to that calling Professor Toynbee has been faithful.”

Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Prophet, New York Review of Books, New York, October 12 1989:

“A monument of wasted erudition.”

• Scope of the blog

The blog is a dialogue with, or interrogation of, a half-forgotten and rather unfashionable master. I nearly always quote from the full Study. Half the fun is lost in the abridgements.

I add commentary to the extracts. Much of the blog deconstructs Toynbee by presenting him without the laws and without the systems. That may seem too light-handed and forgiving, and to be avoiding the point, but much remains when you have done that. His fiercest post-war critics were judging the whole, or large parts, and the further away you stand from this canvas, the harsher your judgment is likely to be. The charm is in the detail. I’ll often choose lighter or shorter passages for lack of time to work on more difficult ones (the journalism and travel writings are sometimes light to a fault). Quoting in blog-sized extracts itself breaks up long passages. This is a mosaic or collage.

Some posts have nothing whatsoever to do with Toynbee, but take a wide Toynbeean view, or are elementary summaries of a historical subject.

The Category called A Study of History may eventually contain a synopsis of the Study, or of each section of it, from beginning to end, as I read or reread them. It already contains a digest of the Caplan abridgement in Toynbee-Caplan’s own words. It will contain the arguments of Toynbee’s critics. (A short list of the early criticisms appears top left here, under Criticism.) If I appear to let them in reluctantly, it’s because I’d prefer to let Toynbee speak first. The critics are also mentioned in an entry called Toynbee. This contains early thoughts I found myself delivering in an argument with some colleagues several years ago, though I have revised this text since then. I will try to see whether and how convincingly Toynbee dealt with particular criticisms by juxtaposing their texts with his replies in Reconsiderations.

This Category already contains some passages in which Toynbee writes about the gestation of the Study, defines his technical terms, or summarises his theories. Other extracts from the Study are filed in other Categories.

The blog’s sources are printed and online material. I have not visited archives in person.

There is a Bibliography: link on the left.

Searches do not pick up words in Comments.

• More on layout and conventions

Toynbee’s words, printed or otherwise recorded, are not indented. Nor is any other text from his books, except long quotations; those are indented but not greyed.

My words, and everything I quote that isn’t Toynbee, are indented and greyed. Greyed passages are usually ideas or facts or interpretations which I contribute, not summaries of omitted passages by Toynbee. The titles of posts do not normally quote Toynbee.

My rule when quoting Toynbee is to follow the spelling, punctuation, diacritical-mark and other conventions of the published texts, which aren’t consistent from book to book or with my own conventions.

There are some exceptions to this rule. I use double quotation marks where Toynbee’s publishers do not and standardise the way dots and dashes are displayed. And in reproducing the Study’s tables of contents (link top left), I have had to impose one or two conventions of my own in order to make a complex list comprehensible on-screen.

[…] means that I have omitted something from an extract. I may not show that my quotation has begun other than at the beginning of a printed passage or broken off before the end, or that I have truncated a printed passage’s opening sentence. (Once, in “The view from 1897”, I have taken part of an omitted passage and inserted it at a later point in the extract.)

An extract may include some, all or none of the original footnotes. I don’t indicate an omission if I leave out a footnote in its entirety. Sometimes an greyed indented passage may appear to break what is really a single paragraph by Toynbee into two paragraphs. My shorter interpolations are in square brackets within the body of an extract.

Some diacritical marks and special characters may not show up properly on a PC. I use a Mac.

The twelve volumes of the Study are, not least, an astonishing feat by OUP of (not particularly beautiful) typographic layout. One wonders whether anything as complex could even be done nowadays. There are few misprints. Where they are obvious, I correct them, if I notice them, without comment.

Quotations from non-Toynbee sources are placed within double quotation marks.

Extracts from The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, The Belgian Deportations and Turkey, A Past and a Future are from online versions of the complete texts that do (or did) not contain images of the original printed pages. In all other cases, unless I say otherwise, extracts are taken from the printed books or from images of the original printed pages, or from EWF Tomlin’s Toynbee anthology, which I take to be reliable.

Most Toynbee material which is online and free (which does not ipso facto mean in the public domain) is at the Internet Archive. This includes pdf versions of some, but not all, volumes of the unabridged Study. Questia, which charges, has further material. I do not link to online versions of any Toynbee texts except The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, which is a collection of documents edited and presented by Toynbee.

Some of Toynbee’s post-war travel writings are based on articles sent to The Observer. In A Journey to China (1931), he relies on pieces sent to various publications. I mention pre-book sources when I quote from the China book, but not when quoting from the later books or the non-travel books.

Where a Greek or Latin, or German or French, passage is given in English translation and Toynbee himself does not state the translator, there is a good chance that the translation is by him.

Pictures for which I don’t state sources are often from Wikimedia Commons.

I sometimes clarify or correct posts after they are published. The mot juste usually arrives late. It bothers me that jejune or verbose stuff or non-sequiturs might get seen for a day or longer, but I doubt that it bothers anyone else. Blogs are unflattering mirrors.

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[In progress]