The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
First let’s deal with the elelphant in the room. Nicholas Crane’s Latitude will inevitably draw comparison with Dava Sobel’s surprise runaway best-seller Longitude, which was published over a quarter of a century ago in 1993 and has remained in print ever since. Sobel...
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...
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...
