Gibbon's 'Rise and Fall' offers 2nd lesson for our own time [audio 14min]

Ever since the celebrated 18th-century historian Edward Gibbon wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, people have looked to his work for signs of decay in their own age. In the second of a new three-part series, 'The Gibbon Test', Matthew Parris explores the view that affluence caused Rome's decline just as it's now contributing to a slow intellectual and moral decline in modern day Britain. Could it be said, for example, that Rome's bread and circuses have their contemporary equivalent in the hugely popular Big Brother TV programme? A writer for The Times and The Spectator, Parris is also a frequent broadcaster on British television and radio.