{"id":187,"date":"2010-03-16T23:25:03","date_gmt":"2010-03-16T23:25:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/?p=187"},"modified":"2010-03-16T23:25:03","modified_gmt":"2010-03-16T23:25:03","slug":"48-laws-of-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/?p=187","title":{"rendered":"48 Laws of Power"},"content":{"rendered":"

I caught a glimpse of an old favourite book of mine on my exceptionally cluttered bookshelves and pulled it out to have another look. It’s Robert Greene’s<\/a> ’48 Laws of Power’,<\/a> which is, I suppose, a sort of psychology book illustrated with some literary (and other) quotations. I’ve always thought that an awful lot of human motivation is about power and the book likes to allude to military strategies as quoted by Machiavelli or Sun Tzu:\u00c2\u00a0 I’ve had a fair amount of what recruitment agents call ‘board level exposure’ and know how much like medieval courts the top tier of management in plcs and AGs are — and the laws can also be applied to business relationships and office politics. Additionally most of the ‘laws’ in the book can be applied to the most intimate or domesticated of human relationships. So in many ways the book could be seen as quite a resource for novelists.<\/p>\n

Here is a short selection of my favourite laws — the full list can be found on a website associated with the book<\/a> (and Wikipedia).<\/p>\n