Word: machiavelli
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...Italian writer named Niccoló Machiavelli journeyed to Monaco to gather material for a book by watching the agile Grimaldi rulers in action. Last week the incumbent Grimaldi, Prince Rainier III, could have used a couple of guileful hints from Machiavelli's The Prince in his squabble with France's Charles de Gaulle...
While most historians have trouble explaining one civilization, British Historian Arnold Toynbee sweeps grandly over them all, comparing Machiavelli to St. Benedict, Moses to Mohammed. But a historian who paints so vast a canvas is bound to fudge some of the details. One of the disconcerting details of A Study of History has now been blown up to book-length size, where it is more disturbing than ever. It is Toynbee's casual indifference to the menace of Communism...
...young British critic named William Empson told them they did not. The sonnet, he announced, contains 4,096 possible meanings. He then presented some of them by showing the sonnet's ambiguous use of words, metaphors and punctuation, by finding half-buried references to Machiavelli and King Solomon and even prophetic hints of Oscar Wilde. Literary criticism has not been the same since...
...Sartor Resartus, Bleak House, Faust, and The Red and the Black into a tidy and orderly cultural unity. Professor Myron Gilmore, the hour's other virtue, presents three disunited centuries (roughly, 1300-1600) in an even stiffer course, his History 130: "The Age of the Renaissance and Reformation." Devious Machiavelli and the sainted Thomas More top the reading list...
...Fool. There is a rough parallel between Shakespeare's day and the present. The Elizabethan view of man was being threatened by a triple revolution. Copernicus had challenged the earth-centered universe, Montaigne had skeptically consigned man to the lowest rung of the animal kingdom, and Machiavelli had argued that statecraft was a matter of the basest self-interest, devoid of moral principle. Modern man has seen Einstein throw a curve into the cosmos, Freud lift the lid on the cauldron of the unconscious, and Marx upturn continents with the doctrine of dialectical material ism in which...