End of a Journey: An Autobiographical Journal 1979-81

For the last five years of his life, Philip Toynbee - poet, novelist, reviewer - kept a journal of his thoughts and feelings, ranging from sometimes calm, sometimes passionate meditations about his relationship with God to piquant and poignant observations about the world around him. The son of the historian Arnold Toynbee and grandson of the Classical scholar Gilbert Murray, Philip had spent his youth in an atmosphere of serious scholarship combined with liberal humanism. His experience of bohemian life of the thirties and forties awakened an alertness to the bogus and absurd which accompanied the independence of judgement which he displayed as the leading reviewer of the "Observer" for more than 20 years. Although his intellectual heritage and his questioning temperament made Toynbee an unlikely convert to any orthodox religion, during the last decade of his life, his thoughts turned increasingly to "those holy mysteries which surround us all" and towards the end, his journal is raised to a higher and more urgent note by the knowledge that he is suffering from a terminal illness. He continued to record his thoughts and feelings even during the last days and weeks of his life.