MACHIAVELLI
HIS LIFE AND TIMES
ALEXANDER LEE
Picador, 762pp, £30
Most persons’ knowledge of Machiavelli is confined to a reading of The Prince, his manual for rulers. But Alexander Lee’s new biography, wrote John Guy in the Literary
Review, ‘seeks to position Machiavelli securely in the culture, society and politics of his time and to consider the full range of his writings, rather than concentrating narrowly on Il principe... What we get is what it says on the tin: an utterly absorbing month-by-month, often day-by-day account of Machiavelli’s life and career, contextualised through a near-epic history of Florence’s involvement in the Italian Wars, from the city’s expulsion of the Medici in 1494 to the sack of Rome in 1527.’ According to John Gray in the
New Statesman, Lee tells us that although Machiavelli married for life ‘that did not stop him patronising courtesans and rent boys, or engaging in a late-life love affair that for a time consumed him’, and although ‘he died an avowed Christian... a deathbed dream provoked a laughing last word in which he confessed that he would be happier in the company of those who were consigned to Hell’. But the author also ‘presents a novel interpretation of his subject’s thinking. Machiavelli, Lee argues persuasively, was a radical conservative who aimed to show his fellow-citizens how to reclaim self-government from a corrupt oligarchy.’ He believed that Christian values were incompatible with good republican government and his message ‘challenges liberal humanism as much as monotheism’, Gray argued, because in our modern world ‘liberal humanist values are Christian values in secular clothing’.
Christopher Hart, in his review for the Sunday Times, alighted on some choice biographical details: that Machiavelli was sexually abused by a high-minded tutor, that he fathered seven children, and that he once had enthusiastic sex with a prostitute whose head was covered with a towel and regretted taking a peek under the towel after the act. ‘Lee’s is a long, dense account of a fascinating man and a complex period, and for devotees only,’ Hart concluded. ‘Nevertheless, it will surely be the definitive book on Machiavelli for some years, and provides tough yet nourishing food for thought.’