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Machiavelli's Shirt
‘And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?’
W B Yeats, The Second Coming.‘How could I possibly tell you what the sermon was about? You know that I never listen to such things.’
Machiavelli, in a letter to his friend, ...
In 1308, the exiled Florentine poet Dante Alighieri described how, midway through his life, he found himself lost amidst a dark wood, with no sign of a path. He had no idea how he had arrived where he was. His mind was fogged; it was as if he had woken from a deep slumber. After walking for a ...
Cities come and go, some destroyed by humanity, others by nature, others simply abandoned. Several decades ago, I happened upon an example of the last kind, in India. The redstone city was deserted, its wide empty paved streets extending into the distance towards the fortified walls. The ...
It is generally accepted that the European Renaissance began in Italy. However, as this developed south of the Alps a historical transformation of similar magnitude began taking place in northern Europe. This ‘Other Renaissance’ was initially centred on the city of Bruges in Flanders (modern ...
Author Interviews
What role did Florence play at the end of the 15th century, and what were some of the factors that led to its prominence?At the end of 15th century Florence had become the epicentre of the Renaissance. This was one of the great cultural resurgences of European history, which took place after almost a millennium of the Medieval ...
Paul, your book was published 15 years ago to great acclaim. Why did you write it, after all it’s the only book you’ve written on the Napoleonic period.First and foremost I wrote Napoleon in Egypt because it was such an gripping story - one which included everything from ambitious adventure and military ‘glory’ to the ...