Jesus turns water into wine Edward Gibbon as an enlightened thinker has an issue with miracles.

In the last episode we saw the Nazarenes move into the newly rebuilt Jerusalem after Hadrian had destroyed it and expelled the Jews.  This time I am looking at just  what is was about an obscure and until recently exclusively Jewish sect that enabled it to take over the Roman Empire.

He’s at it again. Here is Niall Ferguson on the BBC arguing strongly that the problems of the Islamic world are not the fault of Western imperialism but are in fact the fault of, well Islam. It is a bit frustrating because the person with whom he is debating doesn’t really get his point across

The subject of the fifth episode in Niall Ferguson’s series was consumerism, which predictably enough he quite likes.  I think most of us have a soft spot for consumerism whether or not we admit to others or even to ourselves.  But it is a rather magical feeling going to the shops and finding that everything

Writing in the Telegraph James Delingpole picks up on a throw away point made by Niall Ferguson in the episode about medicine in his series Civilization: Is the West History?   Ferguson pointed out that eugenics was widely believed at the turn of the twentieth century, but is now known to be nonsense and dangerous nonsense

I first read the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire at about the age of 14 in a copy borrowed from my local public library.  It was a huge battered old volume with thick slightly yellowed paper.  It looked old enough to have been around since not long after the fall of the Roman