Short answers, pulled from the story.
Edward Gibbon was a British essayist, historian, and minor politician who lived from 1737 to 1794. He is known for The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in six volumes between 1776 and 1789, celebrated for the quality and irony of its prose and its use of primary sources.
The first volume was published on the 17th of February 1776, and the final volumes reached the press in May 1788, with the full set appearing between 1776 and 1789. Gibbon wrote the last lines on the night of the 27th of June 1787 in a summer-house in his garden in Lausanne.
Chapters fifteen and sixteen contained a scathing view of the Christian church and led to the book being banned in several countries. Gibbon was accused of treating the church as a phenomenon of general history rather than a special case, and in 1779 he published a Vindication of those chapters.
Many scholars argue Gibbon did not blame Christianity for Rome's fall, attributing it instead to the effects of luxury and the erosion of the Romans' martial character. The view that Rome fell because it embraced Christianity is not widely accepted by scholars today.
Gibbon said the idea came to him at Rome on the fifteenth of October 1764, as he sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol while barefooted friars sang vespers in the temple of Jupiter. Scholars including Womersley and Pocock doubt the exact date, since his own journal records no date for the moment.
Edward Gibbon influenced Winston Churchill, who devoured the Decline and Fall and modelled his own literary style on it. He was also a model for Isaac Asimov, who said his Foundation Trilogy involved a little bit of cribbin' from the works of Edward Gibbon.