Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win.

We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.Įveryone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). For those who are anticipating the tender malice of her novels- there is none here- her sympathies are wholly engaged, and her native appreciation of grace and elegance is a happy complement. Her establishment as the unacknowledged consort who replaced the Queen, whose unfashionable, dreary little life of pious pursuits could only bore Louis XV her increasing influence and power through the years which overrode the hatred of Richelleu and the people the much regretted failure of the physical relationship she could not sustain - but the abiding companionship which replaced it her patronage of artists and intellectuals whom she encouraged and stimulated her many tastes and interests her houses and gardens all this provides a portrait of a personality and an era which does not ignore the conduct of political and foreign affairs.

The Pompadour, censured at the time and discredited later, is here restored to grace-not only in her beauty, and the charm which was unaffected by the world to which she rose from bourgeois beginnings, but particularly in her dedicated devotion to her 'petit epoux', also a rather irresistible figure here. Nancy Mitford, who has already placed a personal cachet on the French aristocracy in its contemporary survival, returns to the age- and the personages who saw its fullest if final effulgence, and the brilliance of court life under Louis XV provides a splendid spectacle to which she brings an indulgent affection.

Madame de Pompadour by Nancy Mitford