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”The British parliamentary tradition, which we inherited, resisted 19th-century Chartist demands for universal suffrage, based on similar fears that the elites would lose out, until they realized, to their surprise and delight, that it wouldn’t happen after all due to the clever machinations of party politics – which usually manage to subvert the real impulses [...]
”My take on this is that the system has not broken down. It was built broken. It was designed that way. It’s functioning according to the original plan. Democracy was never the intention. Thwarting democracy was. The U.S. founding fathers were clear in The Federalist Papers about their purpose in the Constitution. It was to [...]
” For that small matter of lies”, wrote Machiavelli,”I am a doctor and hold my degrees. Life has taught me to confound false and true, till no man knows either”. In ”The Prince” his personal confession becomes a general rule; ”One must know how to color one’s actions and to be a great liar and [...]
Machiavelli: the name leaves no one indifferent. Perhaps one of the most hated men in history among a gallery of rogues. He has been charged, down through the centuries with being the sole poisonous source of political monkey business, of the mocking manipulation of men, of malfeasance, misanthropy, mendacity, murder, and massacre; the evil genius [...]
The promethean spirit of the Renaissance man, forever inciting him to ”undertakings of high and sacrilegious daring,” is one of the major themes of ”The Lusiads” of Luiz Vaz de Camoens, or Camoes( 1524-1580 ) in his native Portugal. ”No contemporary work,” declared Hernani Cidade, the leading Portuguese authority on Camoens, ”expresses so eloquently the [...]
To North American taste, Camoens, is probably the least readable among the schoolroom classics of Western literature. he seems to be more pertinent, however read as a product of his native Lisbon, the seat of the West’s first overseas empire. The tragic, beautiful city, scarred by so many disasters was where Camoens( 1524-1580 ) was [...]
Next to waging war, the heroes of Jean Froissart, from his compendium of the first half of the Hundred Years War, appeared to like nothing better than a well run joust. For true chivalric spirit, few tournaments matched the jousts of St. Inglevert, near Calais, held because three French knights undertook ”to maintain the lists [...]
”Jean Froissart was born in the 1330s and died after 1404. Although he was formally a clergyman and held various eccesiastical posts, he devoted himself to literature. His works include romance, poetry, and history, and could easily have been written by a layman — there is nothing particularly “clerical” in his point of view or [...]
Though presumably he made neither love nor war, he thoroughly approved of both and took them as subjects for his Chronicles, that grand and noble history of his time, the waning middle ages. Jean Froissart, the poet priest, has imposed upon most of us, indirectly,our concept of the later Middle Ages. The question is what [...]
Not every great age produced portraits. The Greeks made almost none, except on their coins, until the time of Alexander the Great, whose legions ranged over the world from India to Egypt. Alexander had his own private portrait artist, the sculptor Lysippus. That master unconsciously paralleled Alexander’s amazing conquest of space. He changed the rules [...]
