Lucy Hughes-Hallett, 'The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham'

28 October 2025 Audio Only * How do we make a life live on the page? What happens when sources conflict—when legend shadows fact, and chronology must be balanced with interior life? Lucy Hughes-Hallett will discuss the narrative strategies that shape her books. She will explain how she adapts her approach to the sources available and how shifts in point of view can open—or complicate—a subject. She will consider how to balance a clear chronology of events with the exploration of interior life, and how, in life-writing, to distinguish legend from fact. She will draw on the life-stories she has told—from Cleopatra, through Gabriele d’Annunzio, to her most recent subject, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham: the beautiful young favourite of James I who rose to extraordinary power before his assassination at thirty-six. Speaker Details: Lucy Hughes-Hallett is a cultural historian, biographer and novelist. Her books include The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Costa Biography of the Year Award, the Duff Cooper Prize, and the Political Biography of the Year Award and was described in The Sunday Times as “the biography of the decade”. This year, she received the Biographers’ Club Award for an Exceptional Contribution to Biography. Her latest book, The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham, won the BIO Plutarch Award and the Randy Shilts Award for Non-fiction. She is a widely read critic and reviewer; in 2020, she chaired the judges of the International Booker Prize, and this year, she is a judge of the Baillie Gifford Prize. Hermione Lee was President of Wolfson College from 2008 to 2017 and is Emeritus Professor of English Literature in the English Faculty at Oxford University. She is a biographer and critic whose work includes biographies of Virginia Woolf (1996), Edith Wharton (2006), Penelope Fitzgerald (2013), and Tom Stoppard (2020). She has also written books on Elizabeth Bowen, Philip Roth, and Willa Cather, an OUP Very Short Introduction to Biography, and a collection of essays on life-writing, Body Parts. She was awarded the Biographers’ Club Prize for Exceptional Contribution to Biography in 2018. From 1998 to 2008, she was the Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature at Oxford. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2023, she was made GBE for services to English Literature. She founded OCLW at Wolfson College in 2011. She has just completed a biography of the novelist and art historian Anita Brookner, which will be published in 2026. https://oclw.web.ox.ac.uk/event/publi...