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 novelists 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