Edward Pearce MACHIAVELLI'S CHILDREN Signed Hardback
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Edward Pearce MACHIAVELLI'S CHILDREN Signed Hardback
First edition, second print hardback of MACHIAVELLI'S CHILDREN by Edward Pearce and published by Victor Gollancz Ltd., London, in 1994. Signed by Pearce on the title pageThe book is in very good condition (Clean black cloth boards with gilt lettering on spine), with only minor wear to the illustrated dust jacket which is not price clipped (light creasing to the edges). Internally, the pages are clean and tight and there are no tears and no other inscriptions.
Edward Pearce is a most prolific journalist and writer, having published 13 books and looking back on a substantial career in newspapers and notable for being the leader writer for the Daily Telegraph and The Guardian, and writing a number of biographies of political figures. He is also known for writing a highly controversial article in the wake of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster. Educated at grammar school in Darlington, then at Oxford, he was also directly involved in politics, first as a researcher at Transport House and twice as a Labour parliamentary candidate.
He is a political commentator who writes for "The Guardian" and "New Statesman". He has authored 13 books, from The Senate of Lilliput (1983) to his latest, The Great Man: A Life of Robert Walpole (2007); latterly his chief preoccupation has been writing history: A Biography of Denis Healey (2002), Accounts of Irish Home Rule (1999), and the Reform Act (2004); also, as editor, An Abridgment of Charles Greville's Diaries (2005). His other books include Election Rides, an account of the 1992 election campaign.
"The Prince is Machiavelli's short, luminous textbook on political necessity. It argues that an overzealous lieutenant may be used to deflect blame from the principal who ordered his crimes, that a high and pious tone is common from men seeking self-interest, that gratitude should never be expected, that fear outruns love as a political instrument, that colonies are a cheaper means of repression than armies, that it is absurd for armed men to submit to the unarmed, and that the statesman must be a lion to instil respect and a fox to avoid traps.
Edward Pearce has applied the Florentine thinker's notions to our own princes: General Franco denies Hitler gratitude for military help; General Sharon's army makes opportunistic war in the Lebanon like Louis XII in Lombardy and, having as little political underpinning, he fails as conclusively; Mussolini avoids hatred and contempt with brilliant showmanship until fighting on the losing side he finds both; Margaret Thatcher clings blindly to the Poll Tax and dies in its embrace when blameable lieutenants stand handy for blame-taking. Hitler is quicker to take the point: Captain Ernst Rohm of the SA is murdered to demonstrate Hitler's respectability. Finally, Machiavelli's great dream of the honest militia which would protect Florence appears in its double apotheosis -- the SS of Hitler and the NKVD of Stalin.
Some things change out of sight, oyhers hardly at all, but contemporary statesmen, rough trade and smooth, with all be better understood in the light of Machiavelli's cool-eyed realism. Machiavelli lives."
219 pages.
ISBN: 0 575 05514 6
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Edward Pearce MACHIAVELLI'S CHILDREN Signed Hardback