Niccolo Machiavelli

More Power of Fiction

In the past I have talked about how civilians in Syria see themselves as peasants in Game of Thrones, and soldiers in Ukraine want to be as excellent as characters in first-person shooter Call of Duty. This year I want to record that college-edited commentators like Max Boot are comparing the assassination of condottiere Yevgeniy Prigozhin to their favourite scenes from crime dramas in formal published prose:

The most fitting epitaph for Wagner Group founder Yevgeniy Prigozhin was delivered by the shotgun-wielding hit man Omar Little on “The Wire”: “You come at the king, you best not miss.” There’s still much we don’t know for certain (and might never know), but that pearl of wisdom was confirmed by Prigozhin’s apparent death Wednesday after a private plane he was on reportedly crashed north of Moscow.
Max Boot, “Opinion: Prigozhin appears to be dead — and Putin’s grip on power is stronger than ever,” The Washington Post, 23 August 2023 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/08/23/prigozhin-death-plane-putin-russia-ukraine/

The Academic Dis, Sixteenth-Century Style

A good many historians have complained to their readers that their predecessors were DOING IT WRONG. Few of them have done so with the sonorous rhetoric with which Scipione Ammirato in the sixteenth century dismissed Machiavelli’s History of Florence: In sum he mistakes the years, changes the names, alters the facts, confounds the causes, expands,... Continue reading: The Academic Dis, Sixteenth-Century Style