Talk:The Banner of the Bull

Reviews
The Nation, Feb 3, 1916: The prototype of Machiavelli's Prince plays fate in three tales of the fifteenth century. The plots and the ethics are indubitably of the period. The embellishments are not so sumptuous, sartorially or rhetorically, as other spinners of Renaissance tales have led us to expect. Instead the effort seems to have been to revert to the moral point of view of the epoch, the lusty paganism that served, for instance, an unabashed Cellini for his boasting. Probably this is as good a way as any to render plausible and comprehensible the legendary atrocities of a Cesare Borgia. Once only we have the satisfaction of seeing his implacable genius rebuked by a woman's wit, and this is the most dramatic of the three stories. In the others the diabolical acumen of Cesare makes easy game of all antagonists.

The Outlook, Dec. 12, 1923 (From "Unheroic Heroes" by R. D Townsend): The principal personage in Sabatini's "The Banner of the Bull" is a hero in some of the senses of the dictionary definition, but it happens that he is also the greatest villain of history, Caesar Borgia—ruthless, cruel, cunning, the friend of Machiavelli, and, in fact, his model as to statesman's craft. The author has made Borgia the central figure of three brilliant tales of intrigue and action, with a richly colored picture of the period in Italy and not a little of the touch-and-go in narrative that made Dumas the master in this genre of writing. For one, I like this better than anything that Sabatini has done except always "Scaramouche," which stands by itself; while next I should place his "The Snare," which has too much of the history of the Peninsular War to please all readers, but contains a fine story when the interest is once aroused. "The Banner of the Bull" makes one look forward with anticipative pleasure to Sabatini's "Life of Caesar Borgia," just announced.