Machiavellian: a person who adopts the principles recommended, or supposed to have been recommended, by Machiavelli in his treatise on statecraft; a person who practises expediency in preference to morality; an intriguer or schemer. Usu. derogatory.'

For more than five hundred years the name Machiavelli has resonated through the world of politics and power. He was an extraordinary man living in an extraordinary age: a brilliant thinker and theorist who was also a consumate diplomat. In this new biography of the Florentine political theorist and statesman, Michael White goes beyond our preconceptions to draw an objective picture of the author of THE PRINCE and THE ART OF WAR, who has been characterised for posterity as a corrupt, power-hungry demon whose works encouraged tyrants to kill and control. He does so by placing Machiavelli's remarkable life in the context of the Renaissance and its luminaries, such as the Borgias and Leonardo da Vinci.