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