“The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli”

Niccolò Machiavelli

The word 'Machiavellian' suggests fiendish cunning and shameless duplicity, and was being defined as such in English dictionaries as far back as 1569, just 42 years after Niccolo Machiavelli died. He was a fun-loving joker with the soul of a poet and a mistress in every town: an innovative thinker ahead of his time. The trouble with this supposedly revisionist thesis is that the more White tells us about Machiavelli, the more it seems the dictionaries got him right all along. Born in 1469, Machiavelli was a Florentine legislator and diplomat who wrote several works, ...