The Scapegoat with Lucy Hughes-Hallett
Monday 28th October
Topping & Company Booksellers of Edinburgh, 2 Blenheim Place, Edinburgh EH7 5JH
7pm
7.30pm
From the winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize, Lucy Hughes-Hallett, comes an extraordinary story of the meteoric rise and fall of George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham. We are so excited to be welcoming Hughes-Hallett for her new book, The Scapegoat, so please make sure to book your place before they are gone!
The Scapegoat
As King James I's favourite, Buckingham was also his confidant, gatekeeper, advisor and bedfellow. 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 skillful 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 Descartian rationality 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 multifaceted account, Hughes-Hallett summons an era that still resonates today.
About Lucy Hughes-Hallett
Lucy Hughes-Hallett is the author of The Pike: Gabriele d'Annunzio, which won the Baillie Gifford Prize, the Duff Cooper Prize, the Political Book Awards Political Biography of the Year and the Costa Biography Award and was chosen by The Sunday Times as the biography of the decade. Her novel Peculiar Ground was shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. Her other books include Fabulous, a collection of short stories, and the cultural histories Cleopatra and Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen.