Welcome to Short and Interesting – the podcast that reads to you short excerpts from old, weird, interesting books. ‘The Prince’ by Niccolo Machiavelli is kind of the perfect book for this project: well-written and highly-specific but with a lot of boring stuff that needs to be cut out. This week we’re just covering one short section about how mercenaries are just no good, and no sane prince would ever hire them.

Download this public domain book for free from Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1232

Music by Dan Mason. Check out and buy his music at https://danmason.bandcamp.com. For this podcast we’re using clips of three tracks from his 2019 album Hypnagogia. Available under the Creative Commons License, Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported. Creative Commons License details at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

Check out our website at www.plutocrat.biz. Donations are gratefully accepted. Find us on Bluesky, @shortinteresting. If you’d like to discuss copyright, contact us at copyright@plutocrat.biz. All other inquiries received at podcast@plutocrat.biz.

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