Professor William H. McNeill wrote Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life at the request of Lawrence Toynbee, the historian’s sole surviving child. He has produced a solid and felicitously written, indeed outstanding work. Mr. McNeill makes abundant and telling use of material from the Toynbee and Gilbert Murray papers as well as other archives. The Toynbee who emerges from his researches is a complicated and peculiar character—and one whose private, intimate, and familial preoccupations, the biographer argues, have a tight connection with his work as a writer and his activities as a public figure.

Arnold Joseph Toynbee was born in 1889. His grandfather was Joseph Toynbee, a well-known London doctor, who died prematurely from exposure to an overdose of chloroform with which he was experimenting. One of his uncles was Arnold Toynbee, who became a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and who died at the age of thirty, having during his short life made a great impression upon his elders and contemporaries as someone who, both in his teaching and his practical activities, aspired to bridge the gap between rich and poor. The well-known East End of London settlement, Toynbee Hall, was founded by a group of his admirers. Harry Toynbee, the youngest of Joseph Toynbee’s children, who became A. J. Toynbee’s father, wished to emulate his elder brother Arnold, and took employment with a private charitable association, the Charity Organization Society, which aimed to help the poor to help themselves. In 1909 Harry Toynbee began to suffer from