With his prodigious output of papers, articles, speeches and presentations, and numerous books translated into many languages, Toynbee was widely read and discussed in the 1940s and 1950s.

[10] In 1912, having returned from his travels, Toynbee was elected a fellow of his alma mater Balliol College, Oxford, and appointed a tutor in ancient history.

[10][12] Unusually for a British classical scholar of that time, his interests crossed Greek and Roman civilisation, and ranged from Bronze Age Greece to the Byzantine Empire.

[10] At the start of the First World War, Toynbee was found, because of a bout of dysentery after his return from Greece, to be unfit for military service.

For example, he advocated an autonomous Poland in a federal arrangement with Russia,[23] the retention of Austro-Hungarian dominion over Czech and Slovak lands,[24] Austro-Hungarian relinquishment of Galicia, Transylvania, and Bukovina,[25] independence for Bosnia, Croatia, and Slovenia,[24] the division of Bessarabia between Russia and Romania and joint use by those two countries of the port of Odessa,[26] Russian acquisition of Outer Mongolia and the Tarim Basin in central Asia[27] and of Pontus and the Armenian Vilayets in the Ottoman Empire,[28] a strong, independent, central government in Persia.

Of these, scores were translated into thirty different languages....the critical reaction to Toynbee constitutes a veritable intellectual history of the midcentury: we find a long list of the period's most important historians, Beard, Braudel, Collingwood, and so on.

[45] Toynbee is thanked in the acknowledgment section of Mark Lane's Rush to Judgment (1966), which critiques the official explanation of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, for having been "kind enough to read the manuscript and make suggestions" to the book.

[34] Toynbee worked for the Political Intelligence Department of the British Foreign Office during World War I and served as a delegate to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.

[49][50] At the outbreak of the Second World War the institute was decentralised for security reasons, with many of the staff moving to Balliol College, Oxford from Chatham House's main buildings in St James's Square.

To “produce at the request of the Foreign Office, and the Service and other Departments, memoranda giving the historical and political background on any given situation on which information is desired”.

The four Deputy Directors were Alfred Zimmern, George N. Clark, Herbert J. Patton and Charles K. Webster and a number of experts in its nineteen divisions.

[55] During the interview, which was held a day before Toynbee delivered his lecture, Hitler emphasized his limited expansionist aim of building a greater German nation, and his desire for British understanding and co-operation with Nazi Germany.

[58] Toynbee presented his lecture in English, but copies of it were circulated in German by Nazi officials, and it was warmly received by his Berlin audience who appreciated its conciliatory tone.

A heated debate ensued, and an editorial in The Times promptly attacked Toynbee for treating communism as a "spiritual force".

His support for Greece and hostility to the Turks during World War I had gained him an appointment to the Koraes Chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History at King's College, University of London.

Toynbee investigated Zionism in 1915 at the Information Department of the Foreign Office, and in 1917 he published a memorandum with his colleague Lewis Namier which supported exclusive Jewish political rights in Ottoman Palestine.

[61] His subsequent writings reveal his changing outlook on the subject, and by the late 1940s he had moved away from the Zionist concept taking into account the Palestine Arabs' tenure.

"[63] Although not the official view of Chatham House which discussed numerous opinions on the then evolving situation,[64] Toynbee came to be known, by his own admission, as "the Western spokesman for the Arab cause.

[69][70][71] Abba Eban's 1955 speech The Toynbee Heresy,[69] for example, bases the accusation of antisemitism on, among other things, the allegedly negative portrayal of Judaism in A Study of History,[69] Toynbee's frequent use of the adjective Judaic to describe episodes of "extreme brutality" even where Jews were not involved, as in the Gothic persecution of Christians,[69] Toynbee's reference to the Jewish presence in Palestine at the time of the publication of A Study of History as merely a "fossil remnant",[72] his portrayal of Judaism as fanatical and provincial and as having advanced the cause of civilization only as a seedbed for Christianity,[69] his view that Zionism offends Jewish piety by attempting to effect a return to the Mideast through secular means rather than entrusting it to a divinely promised Messiah,[69] and certain troubling passages in Toynbee's oeuvres, such as a passage in Vol.8 of A Study of History in which Toynbee wrote that, "On the Day of Judgement, the gravest crime standing to the German National Socialists' account might be, not that they had exterminated a majority of the Western Jews, but that they had caused the surviving remnant of Jewry to stumble."

He was genuinely interested in religions such as Shinto and, particularly, Buddhism ... and the late 1960s was an era of 'New Age' gurus such as Buckminster Fuller and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

[73] In 1984 his granddaughter Polly Toynbee wrote an article for The Guardian attributing her late grandfather's association with Ikeda as a consequence of his old age, frailty and trusting nature.

Civilizations arose in response to some set of extreme challenges, when "creative minorities" devised new solutions that reoriented their entire society.

Challenges and responses were physical, as when the Sumerians exploited the intractable swamps of southern Iraq by organising the Neolithic inhabitants into a society capable of carrying out large-scale irrigation projects; or social, as when the Catholic Church resolved the chaos of post-Roman Europe by enrolling the new Germanic kingdoms in a single religious community.

The recipients have been Raymond Aron, Lord Kenneth Clark, Sir Ralf Dahrendorf, Natalie Zemon Davis, Albert Hirschman, George Kennan, Bruce Mazlish, J. R. McNeill, William McNeill, Jean-Paul Sartre, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Barbara Ward, Lady Jackson, Sir Brian Urquhart, Michael Adas, Christopher Bayly, and Jürgen Osterhammel.