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are treated with the expected verve, though none of the writers claims to offer more than a provisional report on work in progress. Some of that work has already been more fully reported in English in Jean-Louis Flandrin's Families in Former Times (Cambridge, 1979). British historians may find the uses of evidence (particularly by Eliyahu Ashtor, writing on the medieval Levantine diet) surprisingly conventional, though there is no doubt that more work needs to be encouraged on these themes in Britain. The series as a whole promises to provide a basis for the assessment of the Annales historical approach and will enable students unable to read French to sample it for themselves. But will they taste the vintage Annales? Five of these eight articles are drawn from the first special number issued (in late 1969) after the re-modelling of the journal in the wake of the Parisian 'events' of 1968. Though Le Goff and Le Roy Ladurie are among the contributors, this is essentially a reader in recent Annales thinking (all the pieces were originally published during 1967 69), whose centre-piece is the remarkable attempt by Jean-Pierre Peter to decode, in the manner of Michel Foucault, the obsolete medical terminology of late-eighteenth-century France. MICHAEL ROBERTS Aberystwyth ARNOLD TOYNBEE: A SELECTION FROM His WORKS. Edited with an introduction by E. W. F. Tomlin. Oxford University Press, 1978. Pp. xxi, 327. £ 5.95. Arnold Toynbee was probably one of the most prolific historians of his time, and certainly one of the most widely discussed. If now, five years after his death, he is less widely read than he might be, that is partly because of the sheer bulk and complexity of his writings, and partly because of the controversies which much of his work provoked: too often it seems to be easier to read what his critics have said about him than what Toynbee himself wrote. All the more reason, then, to welcome E. W. F. Tomlin's anthology. As an attempt 'to give the reader a balanced view of [Toynbee's] output' (p. xx), it is generally successful: the sources of the fifty-two extracts included in the book range from the twelve-volume Study of History at one end of the scale to newspaper articles at the other, and cover most of the writer's preoccupations-the rise and fall of civilizations, the growth of cities, the state of the contemporary world, the role of religion in history, and so on. The extracts also give a fair idea of Toynbee's strengths and weaknesses as an historian. He is undoubtedly at his best when writing about 'the Aegean and Mediterranean World of two thousand and more years ago', the world in which he felt himself to have 'the greatest intellectual and emotional stake' (p. 5). But he is also extremely enlightening on twentieth-century history, thanks partly no doubt to his thirty-year editorship of the annual Survey of International Affairs. Throughout the book one is stimulated by his chronological and geographical range: his pleas for a comprehensive approach to the study of human affairs and