Word: offing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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In the contemporary imagination, Edward Gibbon seems to be eternally posed against a painted backdrop of the Roman Empire, proudly holding the six volumes of Decline and Fall as if he presumed to be part of Roman history himself. Yet no matter how long readers stare-it has been nearly...
Gibbon was a small man, just over five feet, and so fat that when he knelt to a lady she had to summon a servant to hoist him to his feet. Rather fussily elegant in his dress-flowered velvet suit, lots of ruffles, snuffbox to flutter over-Gibbon exuded a...
An exhaustive version of the unfinished yet classic work popularly known as Gibbon's Autobiography, edited by Swiss Specialist Georges Bonnard, is now out in the U.S. Bonnard includes Gibbon's notes, his own, and two appendices. Nothing in these pages, however, suggests that Reynolds' portrait was...
Momentary Glow. Gibbon got off to an unlikely start to be historian of anything. Until he was in his teens, he was so frail that his father, Edward Gibbon, gave the name Edward to several succeeding sons-just in case. By his own account, young Gibbon "swallowed more Physic than...
At 16, he became a Roman Catholic. His distressed father shipped him to Switzerland, and on Calvin's home ground the conversion was undone. "My temper is not very susceptible of enthusiasm," Gibbon wrote. Yet once Catholicism, which he had described as "a momentary glow of Enthusiasm," had faded...