Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 In 1475, Bartolommea went to church with her serving girl Nencia. She found her husband, Bernardo, in his study, studying Titus Livy’s histories of Rome. She told him that Nencia was with child, and that the father was their neighbor Nicolò di Alessandro Machiavelli. #2 When dealing with people who are likely to lie, you should appeal to their self-interest. Most people care more about their own gains than about doing the decent thing. #3 The sinews of a common human life are contracts, informal agreements, and reciprocal duties. They are the basis of any human relationship, and they play a large role in Bernardo’s daily life. He had inherited a few small farms outside the city, as well as a tavern in the village of Sant’ Andrea in Percussina, near San Casciano. #4 The world that Niccolò grew up in was full of promises, and people depended on them to function. If they didn’t keep their promises, it was too risky to sell, buy or borrow anything.

“Remarkable, engaging.… Be Like the Fox can be read with pleasure by anyone interested in the craft of politics and the life of ideas.”—New York Times Book Review In the five hundred years since he wrote The Prince, Machiavelli’s name has been linked to tyranny and the doctrine that “the ends justify the means.” But that is not what he stood for. In Be Like the Fox, Erica Benner takes us back to Renaissance Florence, where newly liberated citizens fought to build a free republic after the Medici princes were exiled. Machiavelli dedicated his life to this struggle for freedom. But despite his heroic efforts, the Medici soon swept back into power. Forced out of politics and prevented from speaking freely, Machiavelli had to use his skills of foxlike dissimulation to defend democracy in an era of tyrannical princes. Drawing on his letters, political writings, hard-hitting satirical dramas, and conversations with kings and popes, Be Like the Fox reveals Machiavelli as an unlikely hero for our times.

GUARDIAN BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2017 LONGLISTED FOR THE HISTORICAL WRITERS' ASSOCIATION NON-FICTION CROWN 2017 'A ripping read ... fascinating, charming, enjoyably unorthodox' Daily Telegraph Was Niccolò Machiavelli really the cynical schemer of legend - or was he a profound ethical thinker, who tried to save the democratic freedom of Renaissance Florence as it was threatened by ruthless dynasties? This revelatory biography shows us a man of fox-like dissimulation: a master of disguise in dangerous times. 'A gripping portrait of a brilliant political thinker, who understood the dangers of authoritarianism and looked for ways to curb them' The New Yorker 'Compelling ... this unconventional biography questions whether the philosopher deserves his reputation as an advocate for tyranny' Julian Baggini, Financial Times

The Borgia Family: Rumor and Representation explores the historical and cultural structures that underpin the early modern Borgia family, their notoriety, and persistence and reinvention in the popular imagination. The book balances studies focusing on early modern observations of the Borgias and studies deconstructing later incarnations on the stage, on the page, on the street, and on the screen. It reveals how contemporary observers, later authors and artists, and generations of historians reinforced and perpetuated both rumor and reputation, ultimately contributing to the Borgia Black Legend and its representations. Focused on the deeds and posthumous reputations of Pope Alexander VI and his children, Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia, the volume charts the choices made by the family and contextualizes them amid contemporary expectations and reactions. Extending beyond their deaths, it also investigates how the Borgias became emblems of anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish criticism in the later early modern period and their residing reputation as the best and worst of the Renaissance. Exploring a spectrum of traditional and modern media, The Borgia Family contextualizes both Borgia deeds and their modern representations to analyze the family’s continuing history and meaning in the twenty-first century. It will be of great interest to researchers and students working on interdisciplinary aspects of the Renaissance and early modern Italy.

A uniquely personal account of the life and enduring legacy of the Renaissance library With the advent of print in the fifteenth century, Europe’s cultural elite assembled personal libraries as refuges from persecutions and pandemics. Andrew Hui tells the remarkable story of the Renaissance studiolo—a “little studio”—and reveals how these spaces dedicated to self-cultivation became both a remedy and a poison for the soul. Blending fresh, insightful readings of literary and visual works with engaging accounts of his life as an insatiable bookworm, Hui traces how humanists from Petrarch to Machiavelli to Montaigne created their own intimate studies. He looks at imaginary libraries in Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Marlowe, and discusses how Renaissance painters depicted the Virgin Mary and St. Jerome as saintly bibliophiles. Yet writers of the period also saw a dark side to solitary reading. It drove Don Quixote to madness, Prospero to exile, and Faustus to perdition. Hui draws parallels with our own age of information surplus and charts the studiolo’s influence on bibliographic fabulists like Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco. Beautifully illustrated, The Study is at once a celebration of bibliophilia and a critique of bibliomania. Incorporating perspectives on Islamic, Mughal, and Chinese book cultures, it offers a timely and eloquent meditation on the ways we read and misread today.

There’s been a revolution in negotiating tactics. The world’s best negotiators have moved beyond How to Win Friends & Influence People and Getting to Yes. For over twenty years. David Sally has been teaching the art of negotiation at leading business schools and to executives at top companies. Now, he delivers the proven, clear, actionable insights you need to stay competitive in an ever-changing marketplace. One Step Ahead offers the fundamental wisdom that elevates the sophisticated negotiator above everyone else. Readers will gain the advantage in everything from determining when to negotiate and deciphering a game strategically, to understanding which personality traits matter, why emotions are not necessarily to be avoided, and how to be tough and fair. You’ll learn to be round on the outside and square on the inside, how to command the idiom, why to avoid bumping into the furniture, and how to achieve mastery of the word and the number. While all of life is not a negotiation, Sally says, a negotiation incorporates all of life—One Step Ahead is for anyone and everyone who bargains, parents, manages, buys, sells, emotes, and engages. Based on cutting-edge studies and real-world results, and drawing parallels to everything from the NBA to the corner con game to Machiavelli, Xi Jinping, and Barack Obama, One Step Ahead upends conventional wisdom to make sure that you have what it takes to stay one step ahead—no matter whom you are facing across the table.

From a New York Times bestselling author, a fresh and detail-rich argument that the best way to lead is to be fair Can you succeed without being a terrible person? We often think not: recognizing that, as the old saying has it, “nice guys finish last.” But does that mean you have to go to the other extreme and be a bully or Machiavellian to get anything done? In The Art of Fairness, bestselling author David Bodanis uses thrilling case studies to show there's a better path, leading neatly in between. He reveals how it was fairness, applied with skill, that led the Empire State Building to be constructed in barely a year––and how the same techniques brought a quiet English debutante to become an acclaimed jungle guerrilla fighter. In ten vivid profiles featuring pilots, presidents, and even the producer of Game of Thrones, we see that the path to greatness doesn't require crushing displays of power or tyrannical ego. Simple fair decency can prevail. With surprising insights from across history––including the downfall of the very man who popularized the phrase “nice guys finish last”––The Art of Fairness charts a refreshing and sustainable new approach to cultivating integrity and influence.

A “supremely entertaining” (The New Yorker) exploration of who gets to record the world’s history—from Julius Caesar to William Shakespeare to Ken Burns—and how their biases influence our understanding about the past. There are many stories we can spin about previous ages, but which accounts get told? And by whom? Is there even such a thing as “objective” history? In this “witty, wise, and elegant” (The Spectator), book, Richard Cohen reveals how professional historians and other equally significant witnesses, such as the writers of the Bible, novelists, and political propagandists, influence what becomes the accepted record. Cohen argues, for example, that some historians are practitioners of “Bad History” and twist reality to glorify themselves or their country. “Scholarly, lively, quotable, up-to-date, and fun” (Hilary Mantel, author of the bestselling Thomas Cromwell trilogy), Making History investigates the published works and private utterances of our greatest chroniclers to discover the agendas that informed their—and our—views of the world. From the origins of history writing, when such an activity itself seemed revolutionary, through to television and the digital age, Cohen brings captivating figures to vivid light, from Thucydides and Tacitus to Voltaire and Gibbon, Winston Churchill and Henry Louis Gates. Rich in complex truths and surprising anecdotes, the result is a revealing exploration of both the aims and art of history-making, one that will lead us to rethink how we learn about our past and about ourselves.

A monumental and exhilarating history of European thought, from the fall of Rome in the fifth century AD to the Scientific Revolution thirteen centuries later. The Awakening traces the recovery and refashioning of Europe's classical heritage from the ruins of the Roman Empire. The process of preservation of surviving texts, fragile at first, was strengthened under the Christian empire founded by Charlemagne in the eighth century; later, during the High Middle Ages, universities were founded and the study of philosophy was revived. Renewed interest in ancient Greek and Roman thought provided the intellectual impetus for the Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, whose ideas – aesthetic, political and scientific – were disseminated across Europe by the invention of the printing press. Equally momentous was Europe's encounter with the New World, and the resulting maritime supremacy which conferred global reach on Europe's merchants and colonists. Vivid in detail and informed by the latest scholarship, The Awakening is powered not by the fate of kings or the clash of arms but by deeper currents of thought, inquiry and discovery, which first recover and then surpass the achievements of classical antiquity, and lead the West to the threshold of the Age of Reason. Charles Freeman takes the reader on an enthralling journey, and provides us with a vital key to understanding the world we live in today. Praise for The Awakening: 'The subject of this stimulating and erudite book is nothing less than the development of the Western mind from the demise of classical civilisation in the fifth century AD, through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, to the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. The Awakening is a work of serious scholarship by an author who has clearly been everywhere, seen everything and read voraciously. But it is also a work written with great elan and, given its scope, undertaken with considerable courage... An arrestingly clear design, combined with numerous judiciously chosen illustrations, completes an extraordinary achievement' Christopher Lloyd, Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures, 1988-2005 'The Awakening recounts the slow evolution of Western thought that restored legitimacy to independent examination and analysis, that eventually led to a celebration, albeit a cautious one, of reason over blind faith. In the process, Freeman reminds us that quality, engaging narrative history has not gone extinct, while demonstrating that it is possible to produce a work that is so well-written it is readable by a general audience while meeting the rigorous standards of scholarship demanded by academia' Stan Prager 'The Awakening is a very timely book and an excellently written and produced one. Freeman is a good host, a superb narrator and tells his story with aplomb... His elegant prose is a treat for the mind and the accompanying illuminations a treat for the eye' International Times

How does coding change the way we think about architecture? This question opens up an important research perspective. In this book, Miro Roman and his AI Alice_ch3n81 develop a playful scenario in which they propose coding as the new literacy of information. They convey knowledge in the form of a project model that links the fields of architecture and information through two interwoven narrative strands in an “infinite flow” of real books. Focusing on the intersection of information technology and architectural formulation, the authors create an evolving intellectual reflection on digital architecture and computer science.