Word: romanizer
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Under Beuve-Méry's omnipotentiary guidance, Le Monde has become one of the best newspapers in the world. Damned over the years by conservatives, Communists, conformist Roman Catholics, European Federalists, Atlantic-Pacters and the U.S. State Department, Le Monde is read by them all. Indeed, it is virtually essential reading for anybody wishing to stay informed on the significance of events in France, not to mention other parts of the world. Though its emphasis is on analysis, it has also scored coups with spot reporting, such as a Kurds'-eye view of their war with Iraq...
...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 200 years now-the country-squire Englishman and his awesome subject still make a curious match...
...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 tepid blandness. Joshua Reynolds painted a deadly portrait of him. His profile is distinctly not that of a Roman emperor. He has the eyes of a maiden aunt, a tiny Cupid's mouth, and a second chin far more impressive than the first. Even his hands manage to look pudgily repressed...
...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, he rekindled the glow for a girl he met during his Swiss exile, Susanne Curchod, destined to be remembered as the mother of the writer and celebrated salon keeper, Mme. de Staël. The glow was not strong enough to survive separation and the disapproval of relatives...
...regarded as definitive. The Greek scholar Richard Person once wittily observed: "Nor does his humanity ever slumber unless when women are ravished or the Christians persecuted." Today's scholars are more likely to complain that Gibbon was weak on the Byzantine and that he was most responsive to Romans like the Augustans, who resembled himself: "Urbane, accomplished, and occasionally a trifle pompous," as Peter Quennell put it in a Gibbon profile. Despite his limits, unpredictably, erratically, marvelously, Gibbon and Rome did go together. "Gibbon is a kind of bridge," Thomas Carlyle once summed him up, "that connects the antique...