Like thousands of overworked lecturers, I had my shortcuts.

It was part of my job to teach Plato-to-Nato courses in the history of ideas, and Machiavelli came up early in the year, squeezed between Augustine and Hobbes. Photograph: E4 Picture Publicityīut what if we’re overlooking Machiavelli’s less obvious messages, his deeper insights into politics? Until about a decade ago, it never occurred to me to ask this question. Machiavellian scoundrel … James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano in the HBO TV series The Sopranos. So it no longer shocks us to think that a highly intelligent man who lived five centuries ago, in times we imagine were far crueller than ours, spent night after night at his desk in the Tuscan countryside, his wife and children sleeping nearby, drafting the rulebook for today’s cynical populists and authoritarians. In watching their manoeuvres on screen we, like their victims, can’t help being a little seduced by their warped ingenuity. These Machiavellians are scoundrels, but subtle ones. Along with our daily news, popular culture has brought legions of Machiavellian figures into our homes and made them both human and entertaining: Tony Soprano, Frank and Claire Underwood in House of Cards, Lord Petyr Baelish from Game of Thrones. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the adjective has come to mean “cunning, scheming, and unscrupulous, especially in politics”. Most people today assume that Machiavelli didn’t just describe their methods, he recommended them – that he himself is the original Machiavellian, the first honest teacher of dishonest politics.

But why did Machiavelli write a whole book about them, peppering it with men who soared to power by greasing palms and exploiting weaknesses: Julius Caesar, Pope Alexander VI, Cesare Borgia? Minus television and Twitter, it seems the techniques of ambitious “new princes”, as he calls them, haven’t changed a bit. The book is The Prince, its author Niccolò Machiavelli.

Niccolo machiavelli wrote the prince