Greene is accustomed to defending his first book, but I suspect he's trying to move beyond it with his latest, Mastery, which studies how talent is developed, using a heavily researched slew of examples including Einstein, Darwin, Goethe and John Coltrane. 'Opening the curtain and letting people see the Wizard of Oz.' 'I felt like a child exposing what the parents are up to and laughing at it,' he says. It was making me angry.'Įven if The 48 Laws of Power can be read as a bastard's handbook, he wrote it to demystify the dirty tricks of the executives he encountered during a dispiriting period as a Hollywood screenwriter. 'I went to an extreme for literary purposes because I felt all the self-help books out there were so gooey and Pollyanna-ish and nauseating. 'I believe I described a reality that no other book tried to describe,' he says. Greene doesn't think he's evil, obviously, but nor does he consider himself particularly good. I don't have to pretend to be this mastermind.' I had to learn to be the man inside the quotes. 'Charles de Gaulle said, I realised that when people met me they were expecting to meet Charles de Gaulle. 'I'm not Henry Kissinger.' In conversation at his London publisher's office, as in his books, he always has an apt quotation to hand.

'I'm not who people expect me to be,' says Greene, an earnest, thoughtful 53-year-old with a somewhat tense smile. But when you advise your readers, 'Discover each man's thumbscrew' (Law 33) or 'Pose as a friend, work as a spy' (Law 14), some are prone to expect the worst. Other fans think he's the solution, including Will Smith, American Apparel CEO Dov Charney (who calls it 'the Bible for atheists') and so many rappers, from Jay-Z on down, that the New Yorker dubbed him ' hip-hop's Machiavelli'. They're the ones that read The 48 Laws of Power, his bestselling 1998 debut, saw the world depicted as a writhing snakepit of treachery and mind games, and felt that the author must be part of the problem.

S ome people think Robert Greene is evil.

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