Word: borgias
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...current historical-novel bug has bitten even Somerset Maugham. With Then and Now he leaves the 19th and 20th Centuries for the first time since his Making of a Saint (1898), retreats 400-odd years to the Italy of Cesare Borgia and Niccoló Machiavelli. Then and Now is a talky, occasionally witty costume piece about Machiavelli in love and Borgia in his glory. It is also an ironical sermon on the unchanging wonders of human nature. Novelist Maugham, now 72, denies that he preaches sermons of any kind. Said he recently: "I think it is an abuse...
...16th Century had its bastards, and Borgia was one of them, with particularly illegitimate and realistic political ideas. Quite probably he picked up some from his father, Pope Alexander VI,* who was realistic enough to shock even Renaissance Italy. Borgia made a great impression on Europe while he lasted (he died at 31). He made a greater one still on Machiavelli, who spent a few months at his headquarters, as envoy from the Signory of Florence...
...President Walter S. Mack Jr. has not been a happy man. Try as he did to stay behind the curtains and let a group of painters run the show, painters and critics alike seemed inclined to gang up on him as a soda-pop Medici, a bumbling Borgia (TIME...
...then in his hands" were anatomy (he dissected over 30 corpses); hydraulics (he planned a canal project on the Arno); horses (he wrote an essay on their proportions); airplanes (he made small models which flew); cartography (he made bird's-eye-view military maps for the Tyrant Cesare Borgia); weapons (he invented tanks, portable bridges, one-man submarines, super-catapults); landscape (he wrote the first treatise on landscape painting); botany, geology, sculpture, and architecture...
...Tiber. In the mountainous center the Eighth Army kept the Germans more heavily engaged. British troops captured industrial Terni, ancient Spoleto, once famed for its castle where Lucrezia Borgia ruled. Then they moved northwestward up the Tiber valley. One armored regiment took so many prisoners that help had to be sent to bring them...