Adorable and frankly adoring ... Extremely well-researched and never balks from the many darker or seedier aspects of 17th-century life. But it’s persistently, almost weirdly a happy book. It’s the biography of a climber and a royal favorite, often a duplicitous and always a dangerous place for those daring enough to hold it. And yet, somehow, the book itself arrives accompanied by fiddles.
She brings an immense allusive range, from Hindu spiritualism to Shakespeare’s Ulysses, while often writing in short, pithy sentences. Similarly, the book contains 114 snack-sized chapters ... Precise.
Comprehensive ... Hughes-Hallett’s biography is the first, properly good account since Roger Lockyer’s monumental tome in 1981 ... Delightfully fleet-footed double biography of both Buckingham and the topsy-turvy Jacobean era he helped shape.
Sparkling, witty ... Hughes-Hallett’s vivid, erudite and sympathetic portrait is a more serious but no less scandalous study of a man who was likeable but infuriating.
