'This fabulous biography is long overdue ... Historians need anthropological as well as psychological skills, and these Hughes-Hallett possesses in abundance, along with an easy, wry wit' Guardian
'Pacing is dramatic: punchy, factual round-ups move along in tense, shifting montage, interspersed with disquisitions ... Like its subject, this biography is a prodigy, an almost bewilderingly skilful portrait of James I's reign in all its glittering strangeness' Spectator
'[Biographers] skydive where professional historians fear to tread, and Lucy Hughes-Hallett - winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize and Duff Cooper Prize - is among the most fearless' Literary
Review
'A triumph of historical storytelling, sharp, clear and brilliantly structured ... Hughes-Hallett brings the whole Stuart court alive, not only in its dynastic ambitions, chaotic politics and religious tensions, but in its masques, art collections, doomed loves and fatal disasters'
Jenny Uglow, author of A Gambling Man'More a cluster of evocative vignettes than a conventional biography ... rendered in luxuriant detail are the flamboyant personalities, material magnificence and complex hierarchies that comprised court culture'
History Today'Spectacular ... 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, author of Albert & the Whale'Lucy Hughes-Hallett has spun the results of meticulous research into a compelling narrative about the personalities and passionate relationships that led inexorably to the English Civil Wars'
Sheila Hale, author of Titian: His Life'This electric life of Buckingham captures the splendid weirdness of the Stuart ... but it does so, like all great histories, with a subtle glance at our own time'
Daniel Swift, author of Bomber Country'Atmospheric ... cuts through centuries of disapproving historical hearsay and brings us up close to the man behind the pearl-encrusted doublet'
Charles Nicholl, author of The Lodger
