I haven't read it, but, in general, universal histories, from any time period, tend not to age well. No one can be expert on that many subjects in any meaningful sense, and as a result such a work will inevitably turn into a tertiary-source-esque encyclopaedia. It may actually be worse insofar as specialist encyclopaedias tend to consist of articles that amount to secondary sources written by experts in that subject.

Toynbee was a classicist, so why should I give a hoot about a sixty year old book written by someone who couldn't read Arabic claiming to describe Arabic Civilization? I have plenty of material, even sixty year-old material, that would be a far better use of my time.

I read ( skimmed through, really) his Study of History years ago as a student. It suffers from the propter hoc ergo post hoc fallacy: something has happened before, therefore it will happen again. Toynbee would see a pattern ( like " some civilizations have a rise and fall") and take that pattern as a rule- some civilizations have risen and fallen, ergo all civilizations have a rise and fall. Of course, what's a civilization, how is it defined, separated from other cultures? How is something in , say, 462 AD at all like something in 1914? How much is ancient Persia like ancient Rome? And if you have defined a few civilizations in a way to demonstrate your pattern, what about the civilizations that are a little harder to fit into it? Lastly, as CptBuck says, what did he really know? He simply could not command all the data. Toynbee pounded all those square pegs into those round holes as best he could, but it really was a pretty pointless exercise. .

Toynbee was typical of a time when there was a need felt for historians to be grandly predictive, able to make sweeping statements about very complex, long periods of time. In a new way, continuing a previous tendency historians had of being morally didactic, always stepping into their narratives to point out how bad or good people were, warning and instructing.