Word: gibbon
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Surprising Gibbon. One of the actresses, Maria Schneider, Marlon Brando's co-star in Last Tango in Paris, so objected to her own nude scenes that she walked off the set and was replaced by an unknown English actress, Teresa Ann Savoy. McDowell believes that Last Tango gave Schneider such a phobia about nudity that she could not appear in a movie like Caligula...
...Caligula evenhandedly deflowers both a bride and her bridegroom, their Caligula, unlike Vidal's, is as straight as the Appian Way. Says McDowell: "Historically, there is nothing to show that Caligula was in any way homosexual." That is a bit of instant scholarship that would no doubt surprise Gibbon, not to mention Suetonius...
...Observing the self-congratulatory excesses of Bicentennial America, some pop historians have found the empire's obituary a bit premature. Edward Gibbon's celebrated attribution of Rome's fall to "the triumph of barbarism and religion" has been supplanted by a more trenchant aphorism. "The decline of Rome," wrote Gibbon, "was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness...
...middle of the 3rd century, chaos at the center had led to weakness at the outposts. The Goths became uncontrollable, and when the Emperor Valerian tried to fight off the Persians, he was captured and finally skinned and stuffed with straw. As Gibbon breaks off his story, early in the 4th century, a number of strong Emperors-Aurelian, Diocletian, Constantine-have temporarily imposed a kind of order, but it is clear that their strength is that of men, not of enduring institutions, and that the fall of the empire is inescapable. Gibbon is no moralist intent on admonisinng modern readers...
...Gibbon's work has been much praised in London. The first edition of 1,000 copies was sold within two weeks, and a second printing of 1,500 has just been issued. But there has been angry criticism of what Gibbon calls a "tedious but important" matter: his treatment of religion. Gibbon himself became a convert to Roman Catholicism while at Oxford, and he returned to Protestantism only at the insistence of his wealthy father. By now a thorough skeptic, he speaks of the early Christians with amused contempt. Their martyrdoms were far fewer than religious enthusiasts now claim...