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From the winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize, an extraordinary story of the meteoric rise and fall of King James I''s favourite, George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham. As the king''s lover, Buckingham was one of the most flamboyant and enigmatic Englishmen at the heart of seventeenth-century royal and political life. A dazzling figure on horseback and a skilful player of the political game, he rapidly transformed the influence his beauty gave him into immense wealth and power. By the time he was thirty-three he had been first minister to two successive kings. 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, sex and appallingly rudimentary medicine. These were dangerous and complicated times, an era where witch hunts coexisted with Descartian rationality, and Buckingham stood at its centre until his spectacular fall from grace. From tempestuous scenes in Parliament to the political force of public opinion , The Scapegoat is a rich and compelling story with deep resonance for today''s world. Hughes-Hallett''s extraordinary recreation of the period delves into love, war-fever and pacifism in a society on the brink of cataclysmic change. ''Lord Buckingham rockets off the page of this gloriously epic, seductively detailed biography ... 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
Commentaire
'This fabulous biography is long overdue ... Historians need anthropological as well as psychological skills, and these Hughes-Hallett possesses in abundance, along with an easy, wry wit' Guardian
'Pacing is dramatic: punchy, factual round-ups move along in tense, shifting montage, interspersed with disquisitions ... Like its subject, this biography is a prodigy, an almost bewilderingly skilful portrait of James I's reign in all its glittering strangeness' Spectator
'[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' Literary Review
'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' History Today
'Spectacular ... 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' 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 of The Lodger
