“... club when he was still at Oxford. Anthony Sampson came from Drum magazine in South Africa. Philip Toynbee arrived after his father, the historian Arnold Toynbee, called to wonder if Astor could rescue his son from drink, depression and riotous behaviour. Colin Legum, expelled from his native South Africa, joined the ...”

“... Arabs were not allowed to settle or even work on land owned by the Jewish National Fund: in 1931 Arnold Toynbee noted that ‘all the Palestinian land which is purchased by Jewish funds is becoming ... an exclusive preserve for the Jews.’ However, all this is trivial misrepresentation in comparison with the author’s basic error.The immigrant ...”

“... England’s governing elite. And that had consequences.Leaving Oxford in 1903, Tawney went to Toynbee Hall, the settlement house in East London, where Beveridge had taken the job of sub-warden. Like so many other morally serious and striving young Edwardians, he threw himself into social service, working for an organisation that sent poor children on ...”

“... Southey, Carlyle, Disraeli, Roscoe, Dickens, Cobden, Bright, Ruskin, Macaulay, Eliot, Gaskell, Arnold, Chadwick and Toulmin-Smith are all there; and so are Tocqueville, Guizot and Sismondi. At some cost to coherence, the star-studded cast rolls by. Nor are the arts forgotten. One reason Hunt so fiercely champions Britain’s old industrial cities is that ...”

“... since eaten many things in respectable restaurants with far more trepidation.Only from reading Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History did he learn that the eating of clay was a prehistoric habit, something that kept the stomach filled until the next kill of aurochs. When he met Toynbee, he mentioned his own ...”

“... is wearing). One of the saints, Bartholomew in the penultimate room, has always looked to me like Arnold Bennett (the author, not my cousin the policeman) but somehow I miss seeing one of my favourites, the Kenwood self-portrait against its two circles, which is there but I pass it by. I also miss because it is not there at all The Return of the Prodigal Son ...”

“... unfortunate. The ‘industrious garbage collector’ immediately issued a writ, his solicitor Arnold Goodman maintaining that it would be difficult to conceive a graver libel against a Member of Parliament. Naturally we defended the action. Nearly two years later, when the exchange of documents took place the plaintiffs disclosed two documents, sent only ...”