Shoumojit Banerjee

250 years after its publication, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire remains the supreme meditation on the mortality of civilisations. Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) In the 1980s, German historian Alexander Demandt attempted to catalogue every explanation ever proposed for the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE. In ‘Der Fall Roms’ (1984), Demandt detailed more than two hundred causes that led to Rome’s collapse, from the eminently plausible to the positively whimsical....

Xi Jinping’s invocation of the ‘Thucydides Trap’ revives the long shadow of the Peloponnesian War and asks whether America and China are repeating history’s oldest great-power mistakes. AI generated image During last week’s summit in Beijing with U.S. President Donald Trump, Xi Jinping once again summoned the ghosts of ancient Greece. The Chinese leader warned that Beijing and Washington must avoid falling into the ‘Thucydides Trap,’ the now-famous formulation popularised by political...

There are films that critics unanimously consecrate, and others that, despite critical derision, retain a strange and enduring grip upon memory. Such ambivalently received films are cherished with an almost irrational devotion by those who encounter them at the right age and the right mood. The Cold War yarn ‘Ice Station Zebra’ (1968), from the nerve-wracking novel by thriller maestro Alistair MacLean, belongs firmly to the latter category. I watched it during adolescence when my MacLean...