Philip Toynbee (Theodore Philip Toynbee) Biography

British novelist, poet, critic, and diarist, born in Oxford, educated at Christ Church College, Oxford. His early novels reflected his leftist political sympathies, but with Tea with Mrs Goodman (1947; US title Prothalamium) and The Garden to the Sea (1953) his novels became both experimental and psychologically subtle, the latter exploring the collapse of a marriage partly due to the strains of war. Friends Apart: A Memoir of Esmond Romilly and Jasper Ridley in the Thirties (1954) concerns friends who died in the war. Comparing Notes: A Dialogue across a Generation (1963) was written with his father, Arnold Toynbee. Latterly he produced a series of verse novels (in seven parts), entitled ‘Pantaloon’, which includes Pantaloon or the Valediction (1961), Two Brothers (1964), A Learned City (1966), and Views from a Lake (1968); primarily comic in vision, the sequence explores the 1914–46 period through the shifting memories and perspectives of its old hero, Dick Abberville. Toynbee's journals, Part of a Journey (1981) and End of a Journey (1988), chronicle his return to the Christian faith, and his final meditations on art and life. From 1950 he was a highly influential reviewer for the Observer. See Jessica Mitford, Faces of Philip: A Memoir of Philip Toynbee (1984).