Niccolo Machiavelli

A near-yearlong row about the UK’s refusal to grant full diplomatic status to the EU mission to the UK has worsened, with the leak of a letter reveali(...)

Until Tuesday, Nancy Pelosi, who turns 80 in March, was honouring the rule that people grow cautious with age. The speaker of the US House of Represen(...)

Among the oddities of Donald Trump’s negotiating style is his willingness to reveal his hand. “All we have to do,” the US president said of the EU la(...)

By the time he died, 500 years ago today, Leonardo da Vinci had long risen above the disadvantage of his illegitimate birth. His father was a wealthy (...)

Powerful politicians in electoral democracies have always bent the truth but US president Donald Trump is perhaps unique in turning it into a balloon (...)

Theresa May runs an imperious government and still no one knows if it is any good. Britain’s Conservative prime minister can cite poll leads, mastery (...)

Attilio Bertolucci, the late Italian poet, wrote of his native Parma: “As a capital city, it had to have a river. As a little capital, it received a s(...)

At an event in Boston earlier this year, the renowned scholar Edward Muir identified the correspondence of Niccolò Machiavelli’s on December 10th, 151(...)