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contributors This month’s pulpit is written by D J Taylor. His book The Prose Factory is newly out in paperback. John Banville’s most recent book is Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir. Richard Canning is the editor of Vital Signs (2007), an anthology of American AIDS fiction. John Clay is writing a family memoir. Jude Cook’s Byron Easy is published by William Heinemann. Roger Crowley’s most recent book is Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire. Anthony Cummins is a freelance writer. Lesley Downer writes on Japan. Her fourth novel, The Shogun’s Queen, was published in November. Patricia Duncker is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Manchester. Her novel about George Eliot, Sophie and the Sibyl, was published in 2015. Catherine Fletcher is Associate Professor in History and Heritage at Swansea University. Her latest book is The Black Prince of Florence (The Bodley Head). Charles Foster is a Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, and author of Being a Beast. David Gelber is managing editor of The Court Historian. John Gray’s latest book is a new edition of Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings. Dominic Green is a historian and critic and teaches politics at Boston College. Maximilian Hildebrand is captain of the Butterlords. Nick Holdstock is the author of The Casualties, a novel. Jonathan Keates’s most recent book is The Siege of Venice (Chatto & Windus). John Keay’s The Tartan Turban: In Search of Alexander Gardner has just been published by Kashi House. Sam Kitchener is a freelance writer. Manjit Kumar is the author of Quantum: Einstein, Bohr & the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality (2008), which was shortlisted for that year’s BBC Samuel Johnson Prize. Adam LeBor’s thriller, The Budapest Protocol, is published by Telegram. Norman Lebrecht is the author of Why Mahler? and fourteen other books. He runs www.slippedisc.com, the world’s most-read classical music website. Andrew Lycett is a biographer whose books include Rudyard Kipling and Wilkie Collins. Jessica Mann’s latest book is The Stroke of Death (Crowood). Maria Margaronis is a journalist and broadcaster, and a contributing editor to The Nation. Tim Martin is a freelance writer. Jonathan Meades’s The Plagiarist in the Kitchen will, with luck, now be published in May. Joe Moshenska is the author of Feeling Pleasures: The Sense of Touch in Renaissance England and, most recently, A Stain in the Blood: The Remarkable Voyage of Sir Kenelm Digby. William Palmer has published seven novels, the latest of which, The Devil is White, came out in 2013 (Cape). Lucy Popescu has edited A Country of Refuge, a collection of writing on asylum seekers, published recently by Unbound. Kevin Power’s novel Bad Day in Blackrock is published by Pocket Books. David Pryce-Jones’s most recent book is an autobiography, Fault Lines (Criterion). Donald Rayfield is Emeritus Professor of Russian and Georgian at QMUL. He is working on histories of the Crimean khanate and 19th-century Russian medicine. Patrick Scrivenor has been a soldier, writer, journalist and gamekeeper. His latest book is Mad Toffs. Thomas Shippey was formerly Walter J Ong Chair of Humanities at Saint Louis University. Now retired to Dorset, he continues to publish on Old English and on the reception of medieval materials in the modern world. Joan Smith is working on a book about a murder that changed her parents’ lives. She is co-chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board. James Stourton was chairman of Sotheby’s UK until 2012. Damian Thompson is associate editor of The Spectator and editorial director of the Catholic Herald. Adrian Turpin is a freelance writer and programmer and director of the Wigtown Festival. Gavin Weightman is the author of The Industrial Revolutionaries: The Making of the Modern World (Grove Atlantic) and What the Industrial Revolution Did For Us (BBC Books). Sara Wheeler’s books include The Magnetic North: Travels in the Arctic (Vintage). Melanie White is editor of Shooter Literary Magazine. Frances Wilson is writing a book about D H Lawrence. Literary Review | march 2017 4
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biography catherine fletcher Florence & the Machinator Be Like the Fox: Machiavelli’s Lifelong Quest for Freedom By Erica Benner (Allen Lane 360pp £20) Machiavelli: hiding in plain sight Ever since Shakespeare labelled Rich- ard, Duke of Gloucester, a ‘murderous Machiavel’, the word ‘Machiavellian’ in popular culture has meant being devious, cunning, scheming and quite prepared for the end to justify the means. Most scholars would agree that the popular image is a distortion of the real Niccolò Machiavelli’s ideas. In Be Like the Fox Erica Benner brings to life a Machiavelli who’s a man of considerable political principle. And not only that: he’s also a bright and entertaining sort of chap with whom I’d happily knock back a bottle of Chianti. But has Benner shattered a historical myth or simply created a new one? Machiavelli was born in 1469 in Florence, one of the many city-states of Renaissance Italy. Some of these states were republics (albeit with narrow franchises) and others principalities. Florence belonged to the former category, but over Machiavelli’s lifetime its dominant ruling family, the Medici, used careful alliances and calculated manipulation of the political structures to extend their power. They faltered and were exiled between 1494 and 1512, but within a few years of Machiavelli’s death in 1527 Florence would be ruled by a Medici duke. In an earlier generation, Machiavelli’s relatives had opposed the rise of the Medici as rulers of the city and had faced death and exile for it. Niccolò’s father, whose debts (probably inherited) excluded him from city office, kept his distance from politics. Although he qualified as a lawyer, he lived largely on the rents from a cluster of farms and a tavern. Young Niccolò got a respectable education, beginning with Latin grammar at the age of seven, and acquired a wide-ranging knowledge of the classics, though he would write his chief works in Italian. What we know of Machiavelli’s youth comes largely from his father’s ricordi – a matter-of-fact diary recording purchases, contracts and moments of family importance. The ricordi end in 1487 and the details of Machiavelli’s life from the age of eighteen to twenty-eight remain mysterious. Did he study at the university in Florence? Did he work and, if so, what did he do? Machiavelli reappears in the records in 1497, by which time Florence had dramatically changed. The French had marched into Italy three years before and opponents of the city’s Medici oligarchs had seized the chance to expel them. Now Girolamo Savonarola, a Dominican friar, dominated Florence with his hellfire preaching and famous ‘Bonfires of Vanities’. In early 1498, Machiavelli stood for election for the office of first secretary of the Signoria (Florence’s government). He was not a supporter of Savonarola, and that probably cost him the election, but a few months later Savonarola was burned at the stake for heresy and Machiavelli became second chancellor of the Florentine Republic. It was in this role that Machiavelli made his name, carrying out diplomatic missions for the republic, including one to Cesare Borgia, son of Pope Alexander VI. On the return of the Medici in 1512, he was forced out of the city. Later, however, he worked for the Medici and their allies, writing not only The Prince, which was dedicated to Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici, but also the Discourses on Livy (a treatise, in essence, on republics) and some fine comic plays. Popes Leo X and Clement VII, themselves both members of the Medici family, commissioned Machiavelli to write, respectively, an opinion on the government of Florence and a history of the city. Clement, in fact, licensed the first printed editions of Machiavelli’s works after the author’s death. Their notoriety came later: it was only in 1559 that they were placed on the Index of Prohibited Books. Be Like the Fox tells Machiavelli’s life story. Its title refers to his advice that by being like the fox one can avoid snares. In a rather breathless historical present, Benner organises Machiavelli’s own words into dialogue and commentary as her protagonist makes his way through the religious drama of Savonarola’s regime, encounters with Cesare Borgia, torture and exile, and finally his later years of writing. Machiavelli’s wonderful turns of phrase make for a creative, lively and very readable book with more than a little contemporary resonance. ‘Victories are never so clear’, he writes, ‘that the winner does not have to have some respect, especially for justice.’ Benner is a political philosopher whose march 2017 | Literary Review 5

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contributors

This month’s pulpit is written by D J Taylor. His book The Prose Factory is newly out in paperback.

John Banville’s most recent book is Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir.

Richard Canning is the editor of Vital Signs (2007), an anthology of American AIDS fiction.

John Clay is writing a family memoir.

Jude Cook’s Byron Easy is published by William Heinemann.

Roger Crowley’s most recent book is Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire.

Anthony Cummins is a freelance writer.

Lesley Downer writes on Japan. Her fourth novel, The Shogun’s Queen, was published in November.

Patricia Duncker is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Manchester. Her novel about George Eliot, Sophie and the Sibyl, was published in 2015.

Catherine Fletcher is Associate Professor in History and Heritage at Swansea University. Her latest book is The Black Prince of Florence (The Bodley Head).

Charles Foster is a Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, and author of Being a Beast.

David Gelber is managing editor of The Court Historian.

John Gray’s latest book is a new edition of Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings.

Dominic Green is a historian and critic and teaches politics at Boston College.

Maximilian Hildebrand is captain of the Butterlords.

Nick Holdstock is the author of The Casualties, a novel.

Jonathan Keates’s most recent book is The Siege of Venice (Chatto & Windus).

John Keay’s The Tartan Turban: In Search of Alexander Gardner has just been published by Kashi House. Sam Kitchener is a freelance writer. Manjit Kumar is the author of Quantum: Einstein, Bohr & the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality (2008), which was shortlisted for that year’s BBC Samuel Johnson Prize. Adam LeBor’s thriller, The Budapest Protocol, is published by Telegram. Norman Lebrecht is the author of Why Mahler? and fourteen other books. He runs www.slippedisc.com, the world’s most-read classical music website. Andrew Lycett is a biographer whose books include Rudyard Kipling and Wilkie Collins. Jessica Mann’s latest book is The Stroke of Death (Crowood). Maria Margaronis is a journalist and broadcaster, and a contributing editor to The Nation. Tim Martin is a freelance writer. Jonathan Meades’s The Plagiarist in the Kitchen will, with luck, now be published in May. Joe Moshenska is the author of Feeling Pleasures: The Sense of Touch in Renaissance England and, most recently, A Stain in the Blood: The Remarkable Voyage of Sir Kenelm Digby. William Palmer has published seven novels, the latest of which, The Devil is White, came out in 2013 (Cape). Lucy Popescu has edited A Country of Refuge, a collection of writing on asylum seekers, published recently by Unbound.

Kevin Power’s novel Bad Day in Blackrock is published by Pocket Books.

David Pryce-Jones’s most recent book is an autobiography, Fault Lines (Criterion).

Donald Rayfield is Emeritus Professor of Russian and Georgian at QMUL. He is working on histories of the Crimean khanate and 19th-century Russian medicine.

Patrick Scrivenor has been a soldier, writer, journalist and gamekeeper. His latest book is Mad Toffs.

Thomas Shippey was formerly Walter J Ong Chair of Humanities at Saint Louis University. Now retired to Dorset, he continues to publish on Old English and on the reception of medieval materials in the modern world.

Joan Smith is working on a book about a murder that changed her parents’ lives. She is co-chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board.

James Stourton was chairman of Sotheby’s UK until 2012.

Damian Thompson is associate editor of The Spectator and editorial director of the Catholic Herald.

Adrian Turpin is a freelance writer and programmer and director of the Wigtown Festival.

Gavin Weightman is the author of The Industrial Revolutionaries: The Making of the Modern World (Grove Atlantic) and What the Industrial Revolution Did For Us (BBC Books).

Sara Wheeler’s books include The Magnetic North: Travels in the Arctic (Vintage).

Melanie White is editor of Shooter Literary Magazine.

Frances Wilson is writing a book about D H Lawrence.

Literary Review | march 2017 4

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