Lucy Hughes-Hallett (15:15 BST)

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

An immersive biography of the Duke of Buckingham, King James I & VI’s favourite confidant, gatekeeper, right-hand man and lover, summoning an era that still resonates today as it navigates love, war-fever and pacifism in a society on the brink of cataclysmic change. When Charles I succeeded his father, he was similarly enthralled and made Buckingham his confidant.

In Scapegoat, written with a novelist’s touch, Lucy Hughes-Hallett conjures 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.

Aware of the power of his own beauty, Buckingham’s influence brought him immense wealth and power, becoming one of the most flamboyant and enigmatic Englishmen at the heart of seventeenth-century royal and political life. His fall from grace was equally spectacular as he came to represent everything that was wrong with the country.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett is a prize-winning cultural historian, biographer and novelist.

In conversation with Anna Groundwater

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