The Prince , Niccolò Machiavelli's handbook on power—how to get it and how to keep it—has been enormously influential in the centuries since it was written, garnering a heady mixture of admiration, fear, and contempt. Its author, born to an established middle-class family, was no prince himself. Machiavelli (14691527) worked as a courtier and diplomat for the Republic of Florence and enjoyed some small fame in his time as the author of bawdy plays and poems. Upon the Medici's return to power, however, he found himself summarily dismissed from the government he had served for decades and exiled from the city where he was born. In this discerning new biography, Ross King rescues Machiavelli's legacy from caricature, detailing the vibrant political and social context that influenced his thought and underscoring the humanity of one of history's finest political thinkers. Ross King's Machiavelli visits fortune-tellers, produces wine on his Tuscan estate, travels Europe tirelessly on horseback as a diplomatic envoy, and is a passionate scholar of antiquity—but above all, a keen observer of human nature.

羅斯•金（Ross King，1962— ），加拿大學者、暢銷書作傢，長期在歐洲和北美講學，著有《假麵舞會》《藏書標簽》等曆史小說，非虛構作品《圓頂的故事》《米開朗基羅和教皇的穹頂》暢銷一時，登上多傢媒體暢銷榜，前者還獲得美國圖書館協會年度最佳圖書奬。