"Machiavelli and Guicciardini is the story of how the two men reacted to the specific challenges of their age and emerged as its maturest interpreters, one personifying a new attitude to politics, the other to historiography.

"As such, it is a contribution of major importance not only to the ideas of the two men but also to the period itself and how from its tensions emerged two of the most distinctly 'modern' propositions of the Renaissance: that political theory is the study of what will bring success to a particular state at a particular time, and that the writing of history is not to glorify a country, or justify the ways of God, or point the way to action in the future, but to bring order to the curiosity and maintain the dignity of secular-minded, philosophical man."
-- Times Literary Supplement