Harper John Lamberton: American Machiavelli

Alexander Hamilton rose from his humble beginnings as an illegitimate West Indian orphan and emigrant to become the premier statebuilder and strategic thinker of the American Founding generation. This is the first detailed narrative study of his foreign policy role and ideas to appear in more than thirty years. It focuses on Hamilton's controversial activities as a key member of President George Washington's cabinet and as an aspiring military leader in the 1790s, a decade of profound division over the shape and powers of the Federal government, and US policy toward the warring powers of Europe. Drawing parallels between Hamilton and the Florentine diplomatist and thinker, Niccolò Machiavelli, prize-winning historian John Lamberton Harper offers an insightful and accessible account of the origins of Hamilton's outlook, his bitterly personal rivalries with Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, and his indispensable part in designing and implementing US foreign policy.

Thomas Mistler has always thought himself 'a happy man, as the world goes'. A scion of old money, he made his own fortune in advertising and is now poised to sell the company he founded for a fabulous price. But when a medical examination reveals the presence in his liver of a fatal intruder, 'preposterously, unmistakably, he begins to rejoice', with a feeling of having been set free. But free from what? He will seek the answer surreptitiously, without revealing his illness to his family, during a last reprieve, a moment of grace in 'the one place on earth where nothing irritates him'. But amidst the surreal beauties of Venice, he finds bitterness and chaos as he allows himself to drift for the first time. His halfhearted efforts to seize the day and its present pleasures cannot compete with his need to commune with the living and the dead that crowd his life.