The first time I became anything more than routinely conscious of the existence of that faintly ludicrous figure, the Sultan of Brunei, was in December 1985. Until around then - as Lord Chalfont obligingly mentions in the course of a work that can otherwise only be compared with The Lives of the Saints - the general view (endorsed not only by a public opinion poll but by me as well) was that the Sultan's kingdom was 'somewhere in the Middle East', possibly even 'one of the Gulf Emirates'. If nothing else, the simultaneous appearance of these two highly contrasting biographies serves to emphasise what a serious lapse of knowledge that had been on my part. James Bartholomew's, it is true, qualifies as an almost satirical study, but it would hardly have much point if its subject was not already an identifiable character in the international cast of the rich and the super-rich.

LRB 1 June 1989 | PDF Download