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“... The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilisation (2005). Briefly, after World War Two the Edward Gibbon view of late antique history – Latin civilisation destroyed by Germanic barbarians – became thoroughly unwelcome in the new Europe, as too close to what had just happened and implying some kind of fault-line across the continent. A more ...”

“... most able classical scholar of a Westminster generation which included the imperfectly educated Edward Gibbon, who would later prove sympathetic to the public plight of an exschoolfellow. It was also classically-educated administrators, rather more than the last Viceroy (an inept naval cadet), who would eventually oversee the immediately post-colonial ...”

“... us that it wasn’t George but his denser brother, the Duke of Gloucester, who complained to Edward Gibbon, ‘Another big, thick, square book, eh? Always scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr Gibbon?’ The king, on the contrary, was a fan. George was, besides, a man of exemplary character, the only Hanoverian ...”

“... have denied its essential unity. J.G.A. Pocock, in his ongoing study of the intellectual worlds of Edward Gibbon, insists on the existence of multiple Enlightenments, some of them remarkably conservative, religious and devoted to erudition. The most radical critics of all have gone far in the other direction, subsuming the Enlightenment into even ...”

“... came to seem a mixed blessing, more fundamentally, for the reason set out so ringingly by Edward Gibbon: ‘The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness ... the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight.’ The problem of how these new European empires were to avoid the fate of their Roman ...”

“... a series of ever further ranging intellectual explorations. Wells is praised as the Edward Gibbon of his day, and he is also celebrated for writing parodic fiction of Bakhtinian subtlety whose designs are indistinguishable from the current hypotheses of theoretical physicists like Kip Thorne and Stephen Hawking. Parrinder’s chapters take ...”

“... part of the same momentous shift in historical consciousness which elsewhere produced the work of Edward Gibbon and Sir Walter Scott, which makes Malone’s work so important. At the same time, however, it is also what makes his work so confined in critical scope, since for him it makes virtually any critical activity beyond the provision of historical ...”

“... dominance was reinforced by the combination of Christianity and barbarian conquest, which, as Edward Gibbon observed in the case of the Roman Empire, is a very effective destroyer of cultures. With all due respect to Las Casas and to the moral scruples of the Spanish crown, with all admiration for the Jesuits’ protection of the Indians, we must ...”

“... be true: why else would they say it? Flattery had to mean accuracy. Ahmad Khan drew on Carlyle and Edward Gibbon (ambivalent at best about the prophet) in his counter to Muir. As Ali describes it, it wasn’t unusual for Indian biographies of this generation to lend European authors surprising afterlives. Preserved in quotation in works such as Ameer ...”

“... among his fans Dr Johnson (‘For a broad laugh I must confess the scoundrel has no fellow’) and Edward Gibbon, who told his sister in a letter: ‘When I am tired of the Roman Empire I can laugh away an evening at Foote’s theatre.’ Yet he died, said Garrick, excusing himself from the funeral, ‘very little regretted even by his nearest ...”

“... celibate. As a result, many of the most vigorous and creative intellects – Samuel Johnson, Edward Gibbon and Newton himself after the Principia was published – left the universities for London in search of patronage, inspiration, new contacts and the throb of life. It was London indisputably, the centre of government, commerce, fashion, clubbery ...”

“... reader of novels. He disdained short fiction and didn’t read much non-fiction, unless it was Edward Gibbon or Darwin. I am nearly opposite in my tastes, but we did share our enthusiasms. Thom, for instance, thought Philip Roth was the cat’s miaow. I didn’t. ‘Try The Counterlife,’ Thom said. Which I did, and it dazzled me. Another time Thom ...”

“... of time, and the failure of hope, will always tinge with a browner shade the evening of life.’ Edward Gibbon.1 August, Yorkshire. A couple of years ago we planted some lychnis coronaria by the back gate, and in our prolonged absence this summer it has seeded itself in the stone trough by the back door, with a lone outpost in a crack between the paving ...”

“... content. He was not the only actor of his age to have developed a ‘great melody’ – Edward Gibbon was another – but he has to be known in this way, and Dr O’Brien has set out to depict the ‘great melody’ as formed by what he was and by the grand issues – the themes to which the subtitle alludes – to which he gave himself. This ...”

“... in the last weeks of 1962, I found a bottle of wine in the vacated room, with a note underneath. Edward Thompson had been completing The Making of the English Working-Class. He lived in Halifax, and needed a final couple of weeks in the British Museum. In those days I lived in Talbot Road, newly wed to Juliet Mitchell. She was teaching in Leeds, while I was ...”