To dip into the Decline and Fall is to know what writing and reading used to be like, Robert Kaplan says:
Gibbon’s elliptical elegance is rare in an age when a surfeit of information, coupled with the distractions of electronic communication, forces writers to move briskly from one point to another.Rare, too, in an age of tedious academic specialty are Gibbon’s sweeping yet valuable generalizations. When Gibbon describes everyday people in poor nations as exhibiting a “carelessness of futurity,” he exposes one tragic effect of underdevelopment in a way that many more-careful and polite tomes of today do not.
Our academic clerisy, I’m sure, could point out factual inadequacies, along with examples of cultural bias, throughout the Decline and Fall. Yet nothing on the shelves today will give readers as awe-inspiring a sense of spectacle as the Decline and Fall: of how onrushing events almost everywhere — Europe, Africa, the Near East, Asia — so seamlessly weave together. At a time of sound bites on one hand and 500-page yawns about a single issue on the other, here, blessedly, is something for the general reader.
(Is it ironic to cite that snippet in a blog post?)