Ian Hall on Toynbee's 'Time of Troubles'

‘Time of Troubles’: Arnold J. Toynbee's twentieth century by Ian Hall, at ResearchGate; and from there, downloadable as a 15-page PDF.

I'm fascinated by what Toynbee wrote. Now, having read Ian Hall's paper, I'm fascinated by Toynbee the man as well. Here's a paragraph from Hall's paper:

While Toynbee worked away at narrating events on the world stage, he was also at work on what he called his ‘Nonsense Book’, A study of history. A hugely ambitious, sprawling book, the Study tried to put contemporary politics and international relations into context and to provide nothing less than a complete reinterpretation of the history of the modern West. Toynbee took aim at almost all the accepted verities of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historiography: that modern history was a story of unrelenting and unstoppable progress; that the nation-state was the highest political form to which humanity could aspire; that the West had ‘won’ and that its values, ideas and institutions—especially democracy and industrialism—were thus superior to others. He even attacked the way in which his fellow historians worked—that ‘industrialisation of historical thought’ which valued learned articles on ever more narrow and obscure topics more than bold, broad and book-length interpretations of the past.

If that doesn't fascinate you, maybe you need to read some Toynbee. Hall's last sentence (above) is footnoted; the reference is to page 5 in volume I of Toynbee's "nonsense book". A perfect place to start: the beginning.

Volume one (of 12), unabridged, is available online at archive.org. Start at page one. I'm betting that by the time you get to page five, you won't want to stop.