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The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham

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From the winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize, an extraordinary story of the meteoric rise and fall of George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham.

'Lord Buckingham rockets off the page of this gloriously epic, seductively detailed biography' OLIVIA LAING

'A captivating study of the psychodrama of power’ PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

'A delightfully fleet-footed double biography of both Buckingham and the topsy-turvy Jacobean era he helped shape' DAILY TELEGRAPH

As King James I’s favourite, Buckingham was also his confidant, gatekeeper, right-hand man and lover. When Charles I succeeded his father, he was similarly enthralled and made Buckingham his best friend and mentor. A dazzling figure on horseback and a skilful player of the political game, Buckingham rapidly transformed the influence his beauty gave him into immense wealth and power. He became one of the most flamboyant and enigmatic Englishmen at the heart of seventeenth-century royal and political life.

With a novelist’s touch, Lucy Hughes-Hallett transports us into a courtly world of masques and dancing, exquisite clothes, the art of Rubens and Van Dyck, gender-fluidity, same-sex desire and appallingly rudimentary medicine. Witch hunts coexisted with Francis Bacon’s empiricism and public opinion was becoming a political force. Falling from grace spectacularly, Buckingham came to represent everything that was wrong with the country.

From kidnappings and murder plots to men weeping in Parliament over civil liberties, The Scapegoat navigates love, war-fever and pacifism in a society on the brink of cataclysmic change. In this immersive and authoritative account, Hughes-Hallett summons an era that still resonates today.

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'The Scapegoat brilliantly dramatises the complex and glittering Duke of Buckingham and the political and sexual intrigue of the court of James I. Hughes-Hallett combines the instincts and talents of a novelist with a historian's vivid sense of period and social change’ COLM TÓIBÍN

‘This is an absorbing, even thrilling journey through the dark and tangled networks of Stuart England … outstanding’ DIANE PURKISS

‘A flamboyant character, an epic rise and tragic fall, brought to life with intelligence, tenderness and profound scholarship’ ADAM ZAMOYSKI

‘Buckingham’s rise and fall is as old as Tiberius’ love for Sejanus and as contemporary as a celeb crash-and-burn. Hughes-Hallett is a matchless historian with an unfailing eye for the revealing detail’ SUE PRIDEAUX

‘A true Jacobean drama, except bloodier and sexier. Lucy Hughes-Hallett writes with gusto and insight’ PAUL THEROUX

'An enthralling reassessment of Buckingham's extraordinary career' ANNE SOMERSET

‘Crisp and vivid … The story is a tragic one, no less so for being told here with verve, erudition and empathy’ NEW STATESMAN

‘[Biographers] skydive where professional historians fear to tread, and Lucy Hughes-Hallett – winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize and Duff Cooper Prize – is among the most fearless … much to enjoy in this book’ LITERARY REVIEW

Review

‘Lucy Hughes-Hallett opens a spyhole into the dark, strange world of the Stuart kings, with its masques and superstitions, where a beautiful boy could rise to become the most powerful man in Britain' Olivia Laing, author of The Garden Against Time

‘A triumph of historical storytelling, sharp, clear and brilliantly structured … Hughes-Hallett brings the whole Stuart court alive, not only in its dynastic ambitions, chaotic politics and religious tensions, but in its masques, art collections, doomed loves and fatal disasters’ Jenny Uglow, author of A Gambling Man

‘More a cluster of evocative vignettes than a conventional biography … rendered in luxuriant detail are the flamboyant personalities, material magnificence and complex hierarchies that comprised court culture under James VI and I, Charles I, Louis XIII of France and Philip IV of Spain’ History Today

‘The spectacular rise and fall of gorgeous George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, pearls in his ears, in the arms of the king, enthrallingly retold … a book which is so full of gripping detail that I am sure the subject himself would find it impossible to put down’ Philip Hoare, author of Albert & the Whale

‘Lucy Hughes-Hallett has spun the results of meticulous research into a compelling narrative about the personalities and passionate relationships that led inexorably to the English Civil Wars … a story richly embellished with vivid descriptions’ Sheila Hale, author of Titian: His Life

'This electric life of Buckingham captures the splendid weirdness of the Stuart … but it does so, like all great histories, with a subtle glance at our own time' Daniel Swift, author of Bomber Country

‘Atmospheric … cuts through centuries of disapproving historical hearsay and brings us up close to the man behind the pearl-encrusted doublet’ Charles Nicholl, author ofThe Lodger

‘A delicious account of English politics in the decades after Elizabeth … Combining lively prose and skilled scholarship’ Kirkus Review

About the Author

Lucy Hughes-Hallett is the author of The Pike, a biography of Gabriele d'Annunzio, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non Fiction, the Costa Biography Award, the Duff Cooper Prize and the Paddy Power Political Biography of the Year Award. Her other books are Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions and Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen. Lucy Hughes-Hallett is also a respected critic and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She lives in London.

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The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham

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Product origin: United Kingdom

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