Word: gibbon
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...cool in faith, cooler in comfort. Astrology was in vogue together with "archaism," an aping of the past for the sake of novelty. The death of Hellenism in the fall of the Roman Empire was not caused by a "triumph of religion and barbarism," says Toynbee, taking issue with Gibbon. As Toynbee sees it, Christianity did not put the torch to the classic world; it lit one for it in the sightless dark...
...closest neighbor is a rich and really quiet American. Joe Bellman, who looks like "Edward Gibbon, parboiled," has not opened a book in 20 years, simply lolls in the sea and sun, and only worries how his next meal is coming, culinarily speaking. When the doctored fruit reaches grapefruit-size, Gourmet Joe poaches a fig. "This is how things tasted to Adam," he tells his maid delightedly, "before Eve introduced him to ignobler pleasures and spoiled his palate for ever more...
...philosophy during the last month of study, with collateral lectures by Morton White envisaged. Perhaps more of the year's time might be spent studying the philosophy of history. Being critically aware of the various claims to truth in history is as important for the concentrator as is reading Gibbon or Tacitus...
...passed on a few newsy nubbles about his famed relative: "You know, his father never thought that Winston had the brains for college. Winston got his education as a subaltern in the campaigns of the India frontier. He took with him to India three books, Macaulay's Essays, Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and a work by the Irish historian Lecky. When he returned, he was still in his early twenties, but he had received a liberal education from the study of these volumes. And when he was married, he read Carlyle...
...three other professional sojourns between 1928 and 1939 for as much as five months at a time. Chuckles Gunther: "When people ask how that s.o.b. dared visit a new country for three days and write about it like an authority, I feel like asking. 'How long did Gibbon spend in Constantinople?' Of course. Gibbon never visited Constantinople...