Word: gibbons
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...went to Cuba during the rebellion against Spain as a war correspondent. Spain in Cuba seemed to him a model of all that Imperial rule should not be: irresponsible, wasteful, harsh, above all vindictive and vengeful. In India too he pondered (meanwhile playing polo, serving on the frontier, reading Gibbon, moral philosophy, history and military strategy) and after writing The River War, a description of the Sudan campaign, and a terrible novel, decided to take up literature and politics. Informing the voters of Oldham, he was rejected. He promptly left for the Boer War as a newspaper correspondent. Captured, while...
...Meriwether Gilmer) is a Southern gentlewoman who as a child liked to ride, hunt, shoot and play with the pickaninnies. A half-demented old family retainer taught her to read: by twelve she knew Shakespeare, Scott and Dickens "by heart," had "toyed with" the historical writings of Josephus, Motley, Gibbon. She read "no mushy children's books." Forty-two years ago she began writing a column of advice to the lovelorn which was not perceptibly influenced by any of the writers who had formed her girlish mind...
...substitute for thinking. His wit borrowed its main punch from his universal spleen and political bias. (Said Macaulay, who loved only his sisters: "There are not ten people in the world whose deaths would spoil my dinner.") Most of the writers and poets he demolished-Byron, Shelley, Keats, Thackeray, Gibbon,. Wordsworth, Tom Paine, Herman Melville, to name only a few- have long survived him. And his History, while still exciting for its colorful narrative, is not noted for its accuracy...
Much has happened to England since Gibbon wrote, and to Robert Graves the fall of Rome seems a much more complex matter than it did to Gibbon. Nor does he write of it with the majestic smugness that has made Gibbon an unsurpassed soporific for 150 years. The barbarians were really pretty tough. The emperors whom Gibbon dismissed as weaklings were really doing their best; the barbarian generals were smart men-besides, Rome was a hard city to defend. So in Robert Graves's books Rome falls with a sigh rather than with the sonorous crash that Gibbon heard...
...Majorca Robert Graves, 43-year-old poet, scholar, teacher and soldier, who gained U. S. fame with his account of his War years, Goodbye to All That, wrote his first Roman novel as a scholarly potboiler. Called /, Claudius and giving a sympathetic account of the emperor whom Gibbon considered only a shade better than Nero, it became a bestseller. In Claudius the God, which followed, Graves pictured Claudius as the one Roman who believed that his wife, Messalina, was an honest woman, preserved the flavor of an old chronicle in a lively, modern story...