Date/Time
Date(s) - 29/06/2025
1:30 pm - 2:30 pm
Location
Harvest House Conservatory
Categories
Tickets £10(8)
The Scapegoat is an extraordinary story of the meteoric rise and fall of George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham, one of the most flamboyant and enigmatic Englishmen at the heart of seventeenth-century royal and political life. Favourite of James 1st and Charles 1st, detested by Parliament, acclaimed as the most beautiful man in Europe, and eventually murdered by a Suffolk man.
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 who painted Villiers, gender-fluidity, same-sex desire and appallingly rudimentary medicine.
In conversation with Catherine Larner
About the author
Lucy Hughes-Hallett is the author of The Pike, a biography of Gabriele d’Annunzio, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non Fiction, the Costa Biography Award, the Duff Cooper Prize and the Paddy Power Political Biography of the Year Award. Her other books are Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions; Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen and the novel Peculiar Ground.
She is also a respected critic and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
