He didn't invent ruthless politics. He just took notes.

On the twenty-sixth of December 1502, a Florentine clerk in the Romagna wrote home that the man who governed the province for Cesare Borgia had been found in the public square that day, cut in two. Why, he wrote, nobody quite knew, except that it had pleased the duke.

The clerk was Niccolò Machiavelli. Before him, books of advice told rulers what they ought to be. He wrote about what rulers actually do — from evidence, about men of his own day — and said when the ugly thing worked, and why. Five hundred years later his name is still an insult.

For fourteen years he stood beside the men who decided things, and was never allowed to decide anything. They sent him to a countess bargaining for her own state, to a court that called his republic Signor Nothing, to a conclave that made a pope in a night, to an emperor whose promised army never came. Then he lost the job, was hoisted six times on the rope, and went home to a farm to write, from what he carried in his head, what became the most notorious book in Europe.

Around the work was a life: a friend who had his new mantle cut to fit himself because the customer was away; a wife's one surviving letter; a bill for veal he could not settle; and a comedy that made him famous while The Prince sat unprinted.

Also in these pages: whether he ever said the ends justify the means, whether The Prince was satire, what his job actually was, and what happened the six times they hoisted him on the rope.

Every quotation in this book is sourced. The notes at the back say where each one comes from, so any of it can be checked against the record.

One of five narrative lives built the same way: the documents first, then the life that comes out of them.