JAMIE BRITTON recommends that we all buy at least two copies of a remarkable book of poems
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Machiavelli without fear or favour
GORDON PARSONS recommends a serious analysis of an intriguing figure was ‘in his intellectual prime, a dissident for all times’
Posthumous portrait of Machiavelli by Santi di Tito
[Nickniko/Public domain]
MARIA DUARTE goes down a bilingual rabbit hole with an impressive Jodie Foster
DAVID HARVIE recommends a selection of Harry Cleaver’s writing that documents working-class activism and offers a method, and a way of understanding and investigating the world
DAVID YEARSLEY is fascinated by the account of four composers who transformed their experiences of the second world war and the Holocaust into deeply moving works of art
PETER MASON thrills to the sound of south London-born Yussef Dayes, and the galaxy of musicians drawn into his orbit
From post-human revolution in Puerto Rico to trans poetics and queer mythmaking, these three books that imagine new ways of being together
Machiavelli: From Radical to Reactionary
Robert Black
Reaktion Books £17.95
IT WOULD be difficult, perhaps, to find a political philosopher with a worse reputation in world history than Niccolo Machiavelli.
As Robert Black’s final chapter in his concise but impressively comprehensive biography demonstrates, Machiavelli has lent his name to any if not every underhand, deceptive or even malignant political practice in world affairs since the machinations of the Medici rulers of 15th and 16th-century Renaissance Florence where he played an active role.
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