Memoirs

Thanks to the invidious reputation of his most famous work, The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli exerts a unique hold over the popular imagination. But was Machiavelli as sinister as he is often thought to be? Might he not have been an infinitely more sympathetic figure, prone to political missteps, professional failures and personal dramas? Alexander Lee reveals the man behind the myth, following him from cradle to grave, from his father’s penury and the abuse he suffered at a teacher’s hands, to his marriage and his many affairs (with both men and women), to his political triumphs and, ultimately, his fall from grace and exile. In doing so, Lee uncovers hitherto unobserved connections between Machiavelli’s life and thought. He also reveals the world through which Machiavelli moved: from the great halls of Renaissance Florence to the court of the Borgia pope, Alexander VI, from the dungeons of the Stinche prison to the Rucellai gardens, where he would begin work on some of his last great works. As much a portrait of an age as of a uniquely engaging man, Lee’s gripping and definitive biography takes the reader into Machiavelli’s world – and his work – more completely than ever before.

Karim Hirji has had a long, varied and distinguished academic career. Spanning four decades from 1971-2012, he taught mathematics and statistics in several disparate places: first in a University mathematics department, then in an educational institute focusing on transport and finally in University public health and medical departments. In the midst of this, in 1980, Hirji went to study at Harvard University. He obtained a doctorate in medical statistics. He subsequently worked at Universities in both the USA and Norway. His published scholarship is similarly diverse and profuse and has been published in statistical and medical journals and in books. Hirji’s memoir focuses on the first decade of his career. Known as both a social activist and a committed teacher, Hirji has never shied away from expressing his views. In this memoir, he sets out to tell it as he sees it. His assessments are blunt. ideological disagreements on open display. In my view, the current book is best read alongside Hirji’s other works of memoir. His Growing Up with Tanzania: Memory, Math and Musings is a reflection on his childhood and school days. In the collection, Cheche: Reminiscences of a Radical Magazine a valuable account is provided of his generation’s student activism and political engagement at the University of Dar es Salaam. As Travails of a Tanzanian Teacher reminds us, the aim of Cheche was to provide an outlet for well-known campus activists to express their views on the most important social, economic and political issues of the day: ‘It took the ruling party to task for its half-hearted implementation of socialism. It did not come as a complete surprise that…later it was banned by the government of Tanzania. The best parts of the current memoir are those that connect with the Cheche era of student activism and so provide further insight into the tumult and excitement of intellectual life at The Hill in that period. A good example is Hirji’s account of the student leadership in 1970 and the open challenge it posed to the academic hierarchy led by the Vice Chancellor. In chapter five (‘A pro-democracy uprising’) Hirji describes how before 1970 an antagonistic relationship had existed between the main student union and left-wing groups, not least because of the banning of Cheche. That changed in the academic year 1970/71 when leftist students succeeded in winning the leadership of the Dar es Salaam University Students Organization.