`By far the most audacious and imaginative view of man's time on earth yet undertaken by any historian.Reading it is a major intellectual adventure.' _Time Magazine_. The Guardian, Books of the Day from June 26, 1934, in on 30/10/99 nobody can doubt its immense importance to an age that is in disorder because men's habits of mind keep them in a small world while their economic life puts them in a large. here the reader is offered not some clever and arresting adaptation of the latest novelty in psychology or biology to politics but a large, measured, tranquil and philosophical examination of history by a writer who adds to the rare intellectual equipment needed for so Herculean a task the advantage of experience of public life and contact with foreign scholars and politicians. It would have struck the imagination of any age by its originality, its range, its learning and its power. It is safe to say that there can be few people for whom the reading of Mr Toynbee's work will not be a deeply significant event.
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA.Of Somervell's work, Toynbee wrote, "The reader now has at his command a uniform abridgement of the whole book, made by a clear mind that has not only mastered the contents but has entered into the writer's outlook and purpose." Book Details
Volume 2, an abridgement of Volumes VII-X, includes sections on Universal States, Universal churches, Heroic Ages, Contacts Between Civilizations in Space, Contacts Between Civilizations in Time, Law and Freedom in History, The Prospects of the Western Civilization, and the Conclusion. Volume 1, which abridges the first six volumes of Toynbee's study, includes the Introduction, The Geneses of Civilizations, and The Disintegrations of Civilizations. Originally published in 19, these two volumes are themselves a great historical achievement. Somervell's abridgement, in two volumes, of this magnificent enterprise, preserves the method, atmosphere, texture, and, in many instances, the very words of the original. A ten-volume analysis of the rise and fall of human civilizations, it is a work of breath-taking breadth and vision.
Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History has been acknowledged as one of the greatest achievements of modern scholarship.
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