Word: machiavellis
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
Throughout much of history, diplomats were considered several cuts below highwaymen and only slightly above strolling actors and gypsies. At the sight of a diplomat, a prince might well lock up his papers, his money and his women. In Machiavelli's time, an ambassador was expected to bribe a ruler's servants, seduce his wife and, in a pinch, kill him. As late as the 17th century, a member of the House of Commons seen talking to a foreign diplomat might lose his seat. If such distrust lingers today, it is probably because a great many governments...