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

 '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

The Scapegoat - The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham

From the author of 'The Pike' - winner of the 2013 Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction - a compelling story of heroism told through eight famous lives that span from Achilles to Sir Francis Drake.

 Beginning beneath the walls of Troy, ending in 1930s Europe, 'Heroes' is a compelling evocation of heroism through eight famous lives - Achilles, Odysseus, Alcibiades, Cato, El Cid, Francis Drake, Wallenstein and Garibaldi.

 Not necessarily all good - sometimes quite the reverse - but all great, they possessed a charisma, a strength of will powerful enough to persuade those around them that they alone could do the incredible and unprecedented.

 It is a story of morality and dictatorship; money and sorcery; seduction and mass hysteria.

Heroes - Saviours, Traitors and Supermen (TEXT ONLY)

'One of the best novels of the year so far' The Times

 A SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR

 'Unlike anything I've read. Haunting and huge, and funny and sensuous. It's wonderful' Tessa Hadley

 'I just enjoyed it so very much' Philip Pullman

 It is the 17th century and a wall is being built around a great house. Wychwood is an enclosed world, its ornamental lakes and majestic avenues planned by Mr Norris, landscape-maker. A world where everyone has something to hide after decades of civil war, where dissidents shelter in the forest, lovers linger in secret gardens, and migrants, fleeing the plague, are turned away from the gate.

 Three centuries later, another wall goes up overnight, dividing Berlin, while at Wychwood, over one hot, languorous weekend, erotic entanglements are shadowed by news of historic change. A little girl, Nell, observes all.

 Nell grows up and Wychwood is invaded. There is a pop festival by the lake, a TV crew in the dining room and a Great Storm brewing. As the Berlin wall comes down, a fatwa signals a different ideological faultline and a refugee seeks safety in Wychwood.

 From the multi-award-winning author of The Pike comes a breathtakingly ambitious, beautiful and timely novel about game keepers and witches, agitators and aristocrats, about young love and the pathos of aging, and about how those who wall others out risk finding themselves walled in.

Livres