In The Favourite" Mathew Lyons strips away the myth
- & the self-mythologising
- to find Sir Walter Ralegh in the one role in which his contemporaries knew him best: the courtier who could win the attention
- & the heart
- of Elizabeth I while also being the most hated man in England. Using first-hand accounts Lyons uncovers the maze of ambition desire & amorality in which Ralegh lived before he rose to fame
- a brutal Elizabethan world riven with crime & corruption & riddled with traitors & spies."