Toynbee's "pattern of the past" lends itself to such an inquiry in a distinctive way. Although Toynbee's predecessors such as Buckle, Gibbon, and Spengler were surely not unmindful of the times in which they wrote, they are not in their day full-time students of the present. Because of his position as Stevenson Professor at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, Toynbee was as renowned for his writings on contemporary diplomatic history as he was for his philosophy of history. He moved back and forth between past and present in the two realms of history. In the Surveys he edited, reviewing the year's events in international politics in the decades preceding and following World War II, Toynbee continually searched for lessons from the past. Because he could never set aside the past as he studied the present or the present as he thought about the past, he wove a many-colored tapestry of world affairs that no one before or since has matched. -- Introduction.