Hoy, como ayer nos sitúa en la Italia de los Borgia, en el siglo XVI, y nos relata tres meses de la vida de Niccolo Maquiavelo, escritor, filósofo y diplomado. Niccolo, acompañado por su sobrino Piero, sera enviado a Imola para negociar con Cesar Borgia y defender Florencia, su ciudad natal. Ambos personajes intercambiaran iingeniosos dialogos sobre etica, moralidad, politica y su manera de entender la vida. Borgia sera el personaje en el que mas tarde Maquiavelo se basara para escribir El Principe.Paralelamente a las intrigas politicas, Maquiavelo intenta seducir a la mujer de su anfitrion en Imola, una trama basada en su obra teatral comica La mandragora.
This is an Elementary Level title in a series of ELT readers comprising a wide range of stories - some original and some simplified - from modern and classic novels, and designed to appeal to all age-groups, tastes and cultures. The books are divided into five levels: Starter Level, with about 300 basic words; Beginner Level (600 basic words); Elementary Level (1100); Intermediate Level (1600); and Upper Level (2200). Some of the titles are also available on cassette.
This final, classic collection of stories reveals Maugham''s unique talent for exposing and exploring the bitter realities of human relationships. Included are: "The Lotus Eater", "The Outstation" an
A celebrated writer by the time the war broke out in 1914, Somerset Maugham was dispatched by the Secret Service to Lucerne - under the guise of completing a play. An assignment whose danger and drama appealed both to his sense of romance and of the ridiculous. The stories collected in ASHENDEN are rooted in Maugham''s own experiences as an agent, reflecting the ruthlessness and brutality of espionage, its intrigue and treachery, as well as absurdity.
Autobiographical without being an autobiography, confessional without disclosing his private self, The Summing Up, written when Maugham was sixty-four, is an inimitable expression of a personal credo.
These thirty stories--most set in the colonies at a time when the Empire was still assured, in a world in which men and women were caught between their own essentially European values and the richness and ambiguity of their unfamiliar surroundings--show a master of the genre at the peak of his power.