The Scapegoat

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What to expect

*PLUTARCH AWARD FOR THE BEST BIOGRAPHY OF 2024*

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE DUFF COOPER PRIZE*

‘SUBLIME’ A NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2024

‘STUNNINGLY GOOD’ THE TIMES BEST HISTORY BOOKS 2024

‘COMPULSIVE’ A PROSPECT BOOK OF THE YEAR 2024

‘BRILLIANT’ A SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR 2024

‘A delicious, grippingly paced tale of rogues, riotous sex, regicide and realpolitik’INDEPENDENT BEST BOOKS FOR CHRISTMAS

‘This is the page-turner that Buckingham’s short, racy life deserves’DAILY TELEGRAPH

‘Vivid, erudite and sympathetic … The Scapegoat shows that [Hughes-Hallett’s] eye for the seamy realities of an extraordinary life is as sharp as ever’ THE TIMES

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

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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‘Written with such verve and invention … Fascinating book’ TOM SUTCLIFFE, BBC RADIO 4's FRONT ROW

'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

‘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

‘Compulsively readable and elegantly written … [Lucy Hughes-Hallett] has brought Buckingham gloriously alive’ FINANCIAL TIMES

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

‘Richly multilayered … Hughes-Hallett proves herself alive to the nuances of gender and sexuality in the early seventeenth century…refreshingly light and contemporary, while at the same time suited to the seventeenth century’ TLS

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

Critics Review

'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

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