When the pistol goes off

Peter Clarke

• Arnold Toynbee: A Life by William McNeill
  Oxford, 346 pp, £16.95, July 1989, ISBN 0 19 505863 1

To the man in the street – especially an American street – he was in his day the most famous historian in the world. On 17 March 1947 the ultimate accolade was bestowed: his picture appeared on the cover of Time Magazine, currently selling 1,500,000 copies. For the editors, as they put it, ‘the story of Historian Toynbee and his work in progress was an unusual challenge and opportunity.’ The response was ‘overwhelming’, and not only from ‘professors of history, philosophy and anthropology, from deans of American colleges and universities, heads of public and private schools’, but also from the ‘governors of seven States’, reinforced by an unnumbered throng of ‘businessmen, Congressmen and just plain citizens’. Time’s genius had been to spot the arcane potential in an uncompleted work in six thick volumes which had been gathering dust since their pre-war publication by a university press.