Politicians and the Public: Principles Held and Withheld

The Life of Politics By Henry Fairlie

Basic Books, $5.95 Every good book about politics, and most great ones, is a rewrite of Machiavelli. And this is as it should be. The political writer knows that he must invoke examples, extrapolate from them common sensical observations that he can skillfully disguise as theory, and package the whole with a faint tinge of the outrageous.