Word: machiavelli
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...Enjoy the Papacy." On first sight, Florence does not seem to have changed much. Tourists buzz over Martinis at Leland's* and shiver in dutiful awe before the graves of Machiavelli and Galileo. Business is good and the city is well fed. But there are many different Florences. There is the Florence of only yesterday-of the anglicized local aristocracy which used to go fox hunting without foxes, mounted in pursuit of a butler who panted across the pine-plumed hillsides strewing a trail of paper scraps. That Florence is certainly gone...
...blame for Italy's being in history's junk yard? Italy's witty ex-Premier Francesco Nitti named a couple of safe scapegoats: Christopher Columbus and Niccolo Machiavelli. Machiavelli, Nitti explained, had "made us Italians out as men who are always ready to lie," Columbus was an even bigger culprit: his "indiscretion," Nitti claimed, had "shifted the axis of the world to the West," and Italy had been off the beam ever since...
...Camilla degli Baglioni. Foxy Andrea can tell that Camilla is una illustrissima, but how is Camilla to know that Andrea, for all his fine clothes, is the son of a blacksmith? Prince of Foxes is laid in the same era as Somerset Maugham's trashy recent novel about Machiavelli. When it comes to the vital business of battles, eye-gougings, jeweled garters, entrancing moles on the thigh, and the neighing of palfreys, Shellabarger writes rings around the Maugham of Then...
...reads Machiavelli, Ignatius of Loyola, Marx and Hegel; he is cold and unmerciful to mankind, out of a kind of mathematical mercifulness. He is damned always to do what is most repugnant to him: to become a slaughterer in order to abolish slaughtering, to sacrifice lambs in order that no more lambs may be slaughtered, to whip people with knouts so that they may learn not to let themselves be whipped, to strip himself of every scruple in the name of a higher scrupulousness, and to challenge the hatred of mankind because of his love for it-an abstract...
...sharp tongue (he once described Novelist Sir Walter Scott as "a dwarf who is determined not to lose an inch of his stature"), his always unexpected views ("It gives one somewhat the desire to be buried," he remarked on seeing the tombs of Machiavelli and Michelangelo), his dogmatic epigrams ("The only excuse for God is that he doesn't exist") won him a drawing-room notoriety that his face and figure could never have...