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biography previous works on Machiavelli have explored his ethics and, most recently, proposed a new reading of The Prince. In answer to that favourite question of seminar tutors, ‘Was The Prince a satire?’, she made a clever but controversial case for a third way, an ironic reading of Machiavelli, suggesting that his true views were often hidden for reasons of political caution and that a prince who actually followed The Prince’s advice was doomed to failure. Be Like the Fox continues her argument that (as its subtitle suggests) Machiavelli was a man on a ‘lifelong quest for freedom’, even during those years of work for the Medici, when many of Florence’s citizens were resigning themselves to the unpleasant reality that the dynasty was the only viable alternative to foreign domination. From a historical point of view, however, her biographical method is not without its problems. Machiavelli would have been the first to admit that diplomatic letters – on which the narrative relies heavily – are full of spin. He advised the leading republican Raffaello Girolami (an ambassador to Spain) to present his conclusions not as his own opinion but as what ‘prudent men judge’. He told Girolami, too, that if it proved necessary while on embassy ‘to conceal a fact with words’ then he should make sure his hosts did not find out, and that ‘if it does become known, that you have a ready and quick defence’. Benner’s enthusiasm for explaining what Machiavelli really means renders him a more reliable narrator of his own life than perhaps he should be. Be Like the Fox also compromises on chronology. The Prince was written a decade after Machiavelli spent time with Cesare Borgia, but here Benner weaves together remarks Machiavelli made with the benefit of hindsight later in his career and the comments he made while spending time at Borgia’s camp. She does something similar with Machiavelli’s observations on events he could have seen only as a child. It makes for a very engaging narrative, but this approach to storytelling limits the possibility of exploring the development of Machiavelli’s thought. That said, Benner does a wonderful job of bringing to life Florentine society – the world of the piazzas, the courts, the battle- fields. This is a splendidly colourful book. Admittedly, some of that colour concerns Machiavelli’s rather dubious opinions on women. One of the most infamous passages, says Benner, is ‘too long and pornographic’ to reproduce in full (among other things, it features Machiavelli vomiting over a notably ugly woman). But Machiavelli’s misogyny was not purely a private matter. He was, after all, the man who wrote in The Prince: ‘Fortune is a woman, and if you wish to keep her down, it is necessary to beat and ill-use her.’ He was far from alone among Florentine men in such attitudes, but they were not universal in his age and if one wants – as Benner evidently does – to make a case for the relevance of his thought today, one should address the issue of gender in his writing. We are now accustomed to the idea that the Founding Fathers of America could simultaneously think radically about liberty and defend slavery. Benner’s determined defence of Machiavelli against the scheming stereotype would have been stronger for more of an acknowledgement of his faults. To order this book from our partner bookshop, Heywood Hill, see page 20. Literary Review | march 2017 6  Ian Fleming came up with this sample copy for our Spring 1957 issue. Since then The Book Collector has established itself as the most lively and influential journal in the world of books, each issue offering new and original insights. Ian Fleming launched The Book Collector in 1952, the year he created James Bond. Our Spring 2017 issue celebrates his life as a bibliophile. £60, €90, $125 for four issues a year plus free digital access back to 1947. NEXT ISSUE March 2017 Ian Fleming Special: 288 brilliant pages www.thebookcollector.co.uk
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biography thomas shippey A Very Modern Viking Cnut the Great By Timothy Bolton (Yale University Press 244pp £30) What made Cnut ‘Great’? The short answer is that he was the big winner at the time when the Viking Age turned into Game of Thrones. Cnut was the son of Swen Forkbeard, the son of Harald Bluetooth. On the larger of the two runic stones he had cut at Jelling in Jutland, Cnut’s grandfather described himself as the man who ‘won the whole of Denmark for himself, and Norway, and made the Danes Christian’. All three claims are dubious. The conversion of Denmark does not seem to have made the Danes notably or universally Christian, Norway remained ungovernable by anyone and Harald’s rule of Denmark was terminated by Swen’s rebellion. Not long after Harald’s death in the 980s, however, it seems to have dawned on ambitious Scandinavian kings that the real jewel in the crown was England. In 991, defeat at the Battle of Maldon – an event commemorated in a famous Old English poem – led King Æthelred, later nicknamed ‘the Unready’, to institute a policy of paying marauders to go away. It worked for a while, but the marauders came back, Swen among them in 994, and the payoffs got bigger and bigger. What really impressed Scandinavian kings, it seems, was the efficiency of the English tax-gathering system. So why not cut out the middleman, the English king, and take over the system at the top? Some such reasoning resulted in the long war between Æthelred and Swen, which ended with Æthelred going into exile and Swen becoming king of England – for just over a month, because he died soon afterwards, in February 1014. Their sons, on the Danish side Cnut, and for the English, Edmund (admiringly nicknamed ‘Ironside’ by his enemies), continued to prosecute the war. In late 1016, they agreed to partition England, an arrangement promptly nullified when Edmund died, as so often in such cases, under mysterious circumstances – one source claims he was shot by a crossbow while relieving himself, just like Tywin Lannister in Game of Thrones. By the end of 1016 Cnut was king of England. Cnut is crowned by an angel, from the ‘Liber Vitae’ He cannot have felt very secure. As Timothy Bolton points out in Cnut the Great, he was a younger son and lived in the shadow of his brother Harald until Harald’s death in 1019. Cnut also probably grew up – just like Æthelred, who owed his throne to the murder of his half-brother – under a cloud of disapproval at the behaviour of his dysfunctional family. And his new realm was a deeply divided country, full of treacherous magnates fighting for their own advancements and careless of anything like the national interest. Bolton presents Cnut, in brief, not as a warlord but as a politician. In this he is firmly in the mainstream of modern historical writing, the first sign of which is his endorsement of Levi Roach’s judgement of King Æthelred in his recent biography as ‘a strong and effective ruler’. A fairer judgement would be that Æthelred possessed a strong and effective administrative machine that was very good at allocating resources, organising national fasts and penitential prayers, punishing dissidents and, of course, collecting taxes. But when it came to protecting the lives and property of those taxpayers from marauding Vikings, both the machine and its ruler were, to use a sadly familiar modern phrase, not fit for purpose. Bolton signals his approach in his preference for East Norse name forms, such as Swen and Cnut, over long-familiar West Norse or Icelandic forms such as Svein and Knut. Along with that goes the utter rejection of the whole Icelandic ‘kings’ saga’ tradition as late, unreliable, unhistorical and, worst of all, romantic. This is a considerable loss. In the background, and sometimes foreground, of Cnut’s life are such individuals as Thorkell the Tall, a major figure in ‘The Saga of the Jomsvikings’, and Jarl Eirik of Hladir, conqueror of the Jomsvikings at the Battle of Hjorungavag and the man who, at the great Battle of Svold, lashed his famous longship Ironbeard alongside King Olaf ’s even more famous Long Serpent for the crews to fight it out. The saga accounts may be too good to believe – though the execution scene that follows the Battle of Hjorungavag in the saga has received grisly archaeological corroboration in recent years – but Svold was well remembered by the many Icelandic families that gained prestige from having ancestors who had fought on either side. The stories are a reminder that at least half of what gave early medieval kings their power was fear and violence. The other half was bribery and power-broking, and nowadays this is a march 2017 | Literary Review 7

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biography previous works on Machiavelli have explored his ethics and, most recently, proposed a new reading of The Prince. In answer to that favourite question of seminar tutors, ‘Was The Prince a satire?’, she made a clever but controversial case for a third way, an ironic reading of Machiavelli, suggesting that his true views were often hidden for reasons of political caution and that a prince who actually followed The Prince’s advice was doomed to failure. Be Like the Fox continues her argument that (as its subtitle suggests) Machiavelli was a man on a ‘lifelong quest for freedom’, even during those years of work for the Medici, when many of Florence’s citizens were resigning themselves to the unpleasant reality that the dynasty was the only viable alternative to foreign domination.

From a historical point of view, however, her biographical method is not without its problems. Machiavelli would have been the first to admit that diplomatic letters – on which the narrative relies heavily – are full of spin. He advised the leading republican Raffaello Girolami (an ambassador to Spain) to present his conclusions not as his own opinion but as what ‘prudent men judge’. He told Girolami, too, that if it proved necessary while on embassy ‘to conceal a fact with words’ then he should make sure his hosts did not find out, and that ‘if it does become known, that you have a ready and quick defence’. Benner’s enthusiasm for explaining what Machiavelli really means renders him a more reliable narrator of his own life than perhaps he should be. Be Like the Fox also compromises on chronology. The Prince was written a decade after Machiavelli spent time with Cesare Borgia, but here Benner weaves together remarks Machiavelli made with the benefit of hindsight later in his career and the comments he made while spending time at Borgia’s camp. She does something similar with Machiavelli’s observations on events he could have seen only as a child. It makes for a very engaging narrative, but this approach to storytelling limits the possibility of exploring the development of Machiavelli’s thought.

That said, Benner does a wonderful job of bringing to life Florentine society – the world of the piazzas, the courts, the battle-

fields. This is a splendidly colourful book. Admittedly, some of that colour concerns Machiavelli’s rather dubious opinions on women. One of the most infamous passages, says Benner, is ‘too long and pornographic’ to reproduce in full (among other things, it features Machiavelli vomiting over a notably ugly woman). But Machiavelli’s misogyny was not purely a private matter. He was, after all, the man who wrote in The Prince: ‘Fortune is a woman, and if you wish to keep her down, it is necessary to beat and ill-use her.’ He was far from alone among Florentine men in such attitudes, but they were not universal in his age and if one wants – as Benner evidently does – to make a case for the relevance of his thought today, one should address the issue of gender in his writing. We are now accustomed to the idea that the Founding Fathers of America could simultaneously think radically about liberty and defend slavery. Benner’s determined defence of Machiavelli against the scheming stereotype would have been stronger for more of an acknowledgement of his faults. To order this book from our partner bookshop, Heywood Hill, see page 20.

Literary Review | march 2017 6

 Ian Fleming came up with this sample copy for our Spring 1957 issue.

Since then The Book Collector has established itself as the most lively and influential journal in the world of books, each issue offering new and original insights. Ian Fleming launched The Book Collector in 1952, the year he created James Bond. Our Spring 2017 issue celebrates his life as a bibliophile. £60, €90, $125 for four issues a year plus free digital access back to 1947.

NEXT ISSUE March 2017 Ian Fleming Special: 288 brilliant pages www.thebookcollector.co.uk

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