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The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham
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About This Book
From the winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize, an extraordinary story of the meteoric rise and fall of King James I's favorite, George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham. As the king's lover, Buckingham was one of the most flamboyant and enigmatic seventeenth-century Englishmen at the heart of royal and political life. A dazzling figure on horseback and a skillful 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 center--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, and pacifism in a society on the brink of cataclysmic change.
Reviews
"Great men and politics history at its best."
"Perceptively lays out the complex roles of young women in the aristocracy ..."
"Historians need anthropological as well as psychological skills, and these Hughes-Hallett possesses in abundance, along with an easy, wry wit."
"Sparkling, engaging ..."
"Hughes-Hallett's vivid, erudite and sympathetic portrait is a more serious but no less scandalous study of a man who was likeable but infuriating."
"Hughes-Hallett's biography is the first, properly good account since Roger Lockyer's monumental tome in 1981 ..."
"She brings an immense allusive range, from Hindu spiritualism to Shakespeare's Ulysses, while often writing in short, pithy sentences."
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