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Linda Colley, 4 May 1989

The Blackwell Dictionary of Historians 
edited by John Cannon, R.H.C. Davis, William Doyle and Jack Greene.
Blackwell, 480 pp., £39.95, September 1988, 9780631147084
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Edward Gibbon, Luminous Historian, 1772-1794 
by Patricia Craddock.
Johns Hopkins, 432 pp., £19, February 1989, 0 8018 3720 0
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GibbonMaking History 
by Roy Porter.
Palgrave, 187 pp., £14.95, February 1989, 0 312 02728 1
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Macaulay 
by Owen Dudley Edwards.
Trafalgar Square, 160 pp., £5.95, October 1988, 9780297794684
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Acton 
by Hugh Tulloch.
Trafalgar Square, 144 pp., £5.95, October 1988, 0 297 79470 1
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... or adventurous wrote it for money. This point is hammered home by Patricia Craddock’s book on Edward Gibbon, the second part of a superb and definitive biography, and by these studies of Edward Gibbon, Thomas Babington Macaulay and John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, pioneer ...

Was He One of Them?

J.G.A. Pocock, 23 February 1995

Edward GibbonThe History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vols I-VI 
edited by David Womersley.
Allen Lane, 1114 pp., £75, November 1994, 0 7139 9124 0
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... David Womersley’s massive and elegant edition of Gibbon is the better timed because it comes a century after the edition scholars have been obliged to use as the nearest to a critical text. It was in 1896 that J.B. Bury brought out the first volume of his edition, which he reissued in 1909 and which until now has been considered standard ...

Writing the History of Middle Earth

Colin Kidd: Edward Gibbon, 6 July 2000

Barbarism and Religion Vol 1: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737-64 
by J.G.A. Pocock.
Cambridge, 339 pp., £55, October 1999, 0 521 77921 9
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Barbarism and Religion Vol 2: Narratives of Civil Government 
by J.G.A. Pocock.
Cambridge, 422 pp., £55, October 1999, 0 521 77921 9
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... to ancient Chinese philosophy and the conceptual vocabulary of Maori discourse. The world of Edward Gibbon (1737-94) provides a canvas spacious enough for a work which blends the various themes that have exercised Pocock’s career. For Barbarism and Religion is no narrow biographical study, but provides a full ‘ecology’ of ...

The Men from God Knows Where

Maurice Keen: The Hundred Years War, 27 April 2000

The Hundred Years War. Vol. II: Trial by Fire 
by Jonathan Sumption.
Faber, 680 pp., £30, August 1999, 0 571 13896 9
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... Like Edward Gibbon, that earlier master of narrative history, Jonathan Sumption went to Magdalen College, Oxford and stayed the course there longer and more successfully than his great predecessor. There are other points of comparison. Both left academia early for more public walks in life; Gibbon successively as squire, officer in the militia and Member of Parliament, Sumption for the Bar, where he became a leading QC ...

Europe, what Europe?

Colin Kidd: J.G.A. Pocock, 6 November 2008

The Discovery of Islands: Essays in British History 
by J.G.A. Pocock.
Cambridge, 344 pp., £18.99, September 2005, 9780521616454
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Barbarism and Religion. Vol. III: The First Decline and Fall 
by J.G.A. Pocock.
Cambridge, 527 pp., £19.99, October 2005, 0 521 67233 3
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Barbarism and Religion. Vol. IV: Barbarians, Savages and Empires 
by J.G.A. Pocock.
Cambridge, 372 pp., £17.99, February 2008, 978 0 521 72101 1
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... of the Eurasian land-mass’ is one of the keys to appreciating his vast, multi-volume project on Edward Gibbon and his contexts. The subject matter of the sequence, titled Barbarism and Religion, is not simply Gibbon’s masterwork, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88): it expands beyond ...

Byzantine Laments

Barbara Newman: Anna Komnene, Historian, 2 March 2017

Anna Komnene: The Life and Work of a Medieval Historian 
by Leonora Neville.
Oxford, 240 pp., £41.99, September 2016, 978 0 19 049817 7
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... accepted her authorship while punishing her for her transgression. A lurid tale, dating back to Edward Gibbon in 1788, has it that she herself aspired to the throne and, ‘stimulated by ambition and revenge’, plotted to murder her brother John in order to seize it. When her plans were foiled, the guilty princess tried to console herself with ...

Diary

R.W. Johnson: Magdalen College, 19 November 2009

... Tory reaction. Brockliss attempts the usual throat-clearing defence against the damning verdict of Edward Gibbon, who went up in 1752. He said he spent an ‘idle and unprofitable’ time there, and spoke of the fellows as ‘decent easy men, who supinely enjoyed the gifts of the founder: their days were filled by a series of uniform employments; the ...

At least that was the idea

Thomas Keymer: Johnson and Boswell’s Club, 10 October 2019

The Club: Johnson, Boswell and the Friends who Shaped an Age 
by Leo Damrosch.
Yale, 488 pp., £20, April 2019, 978 0 300 21790 2
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... a political orator and thinker was yet to take off. Other heavyweights joined a few years later: Edward Gibbon was made a member in 1774 and Adam Smith in 1775. The importance of other members, such as James Boswell and the pioneering linguistician William Jones, was recognised only posthumously. Alongside Johnson himself (and before one even gets to ...

The Ironist

J.G.A. Pocock: Gibbon under Fire, 14 November 2002

Gibbon and the ‘Watchmen of the Holy City’: The Historian and His Reputation 1776-1815 
by David Womersley.
Oxford, 452 pp., £65, January 2002, 0 19 818733 5
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... Since two pioneering studies appeared in 1954, Arnaldo Momigliano’s ‘Gibbon’s Contribution to Historical Method’, and Giuseppe Giarrizzo’s Edward Gibbon e la cultura europea del Settecento, the historian of the Roman Empire has himself become the object of serious historical study ...

From the Urals to the Himalayas

T.H. Barrett, 12 July 1990

The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia 
edited by Denis Sinor.
Cambridge, 518 pp., £60, March 1990, 0 521 24304 1
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... Any number can play the game, though for some reason a long tradition of British writers from Edward Gibbon to Bruce Chatwin have proved particularly good at it. Perhaps the Hobbit-like scale of British life irritates beyond endurance many who actually yearn to be sleeping out under the stars where they stand a reasonable chance of having their ...

In Her Philosopher’s Cloak

Barbara Graziosi: Hypatia, 17 August 2017

Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher 
by Edward J. Watts.
Oxford, 205 pp., £19.99, April 2017, 978 0 19 021003 8
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... bones with sharp oyster shells, and her quivering limbs were delivered to the flames.’ This is Gibbon’s description of the murder of the mathematician and philosopher Hypatia in 415 ad. Some details stem from his imagination (‘her quivering limbs’); some from mistranslated Greek (his ‘oyster shells’ are probably roof tiles, the weapon of choice ...

They burned and looted with discrimination

Josephine Quinn: A Goth named Alaric, 18 March 2021

Alaric the Goth: An Outsider’s History of the Fall of Rome 
by Douglas Boin.
Norton, 254 pp., £19.99, July 2020, 978 0 393 63569 0
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... as Trajan and Septimius Severus, who hailed from Spain and Africa. By the 18th century, however, Edward Gibbon and others had concluded that the problem was the Romans themselves, and their loss of faith in the enlightened civic values that had once made Rome great. A different response would be that the Roman Empire didn’t fall in the fifth ...

Departure and Arrival Times

Sheldon Rothblatt, 18 August 1983

The History Men: The Historical Profession in England since the Renaissance 
by John Kenyon.
Weidenfeld, 322 pp., £16.50, March 1983, 0 297 78081 6
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... piquant. It is odd to think of Geoffrey Elton, Hugh Trevor-Roper and Lewis Namier as one thinks of Edward Freeman, Samuel Gardner and Edward Gibbon, humanised and distanced at the same time. Vanity and virtue, foolishness and brilliance rub shoulders. One imagines one has heard it all before, but the cumulative effect ...

He Couldn’t Stop Himself

Michael Kulikowski: Justinian’s Wars, 21 March 2019

The Codex of Justinian 
translated by Fred H. Blume, edited by Bruce W. Frier.
Cambridge, three vols, 2963 pp., £450, May 2016
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... were abandoned to a promiscuous crowd of citizens and strangers of every rank,’ in the words of Edward Gibbon, a worthy successor to Procopius, though he regretted that ‘her murmurs, her pleasures and her arts must be veiled in the obscurity of a learned language.’ The convent she founded for reformed prostitutes, according to the Secret ...

Goose Girl

Josephine Quinn: Empress Theodora, 4 May 2017

Theodora: Actress, Empress, Saint 
by David Potter.
Oxford, 277 pp., £17.99, January 2016, 978 0 19 974076 5
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... But his claims have been treated as scholarly fact for far too long: as early as the 1780s Edward Gibbon declared that ‘in the exercise of supreme power, the first act of Justinian was to divide it with the woman whom he loved, the famous Theodora, whose strange elevation cannot be applauded as the triumph of female virtue.’ Theodora’s ...

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