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 17th-century royal and political life. A dazzling figure on horseback and a skilful player of the political game, he transformed the influence his beauty gave him into immense wealth and power. By the time he was 33 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.