22 MAY 1959, Page 21

TOYNBEE'S GREECE

SIR,—Mr. Hugh Lloyd-Jones in. his review of Arnold J. Toynbee's Home University Library volume, Hellenism, describes it as a modernised ver- sion of a book originally written in 1914. Thai is not so. As Dr. Toynbce explains in his Preface, the book was commissioned for the series in 1914 by one of the editors, the late Professor Gilbert Murray. Toynbee (then a Fellow of Balliol) submitted a plan of the work to Murray. Then the first war came, and the project remained unfulfilled until after a second world war. Hellenism was written in 1956-57, after Toynbee had seen on his travels much more 'of the theatre in which the drama was performed' than he had seen when first planning the work in 1914.— Yours faithfully,

JOHN WHITE Publicity Manager Oxford University Press, Amen House, Warwick Square, EC4

[Hugh Lloyd-Jones writes: 'I must apologise for having misinterpreted the wording of Dr. Toynbee's Preface. At first reading, it seemed to mean what ,I now know it does mean; but when I read the book 1 found it hard to believe that much of it could have been written later than the first war.'—Editor, Spectator.]