THE KING OF BLING

“I suppose that the greatest moment in the life of any revolutionary is when he walks through the royal palaces of the freshly deposed monarch and begins to finger his former master’s possessions,” wrote the freshly deposed King Farouk of Egypt in the early 1950s, adding that he would have liked to have been a fly on the wall when the pillaging took place: “I admit that I would have enjoyed seeing those prudish, clerkly sect leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood as they drifted through my rooms like elderly ladies on a cook’s tour, pulling open drawers, prying into cupboards and wardrobes, and gaping like country bumpkins at the number of the king’s clean shirts.”

“When the burdens of duty seemed overwhelming, poring over my collections kept me from nervous exhaustion.”

Farouk was somewhat loose with the historical facts: he was overthrown by the Free Officers’ Movement of the Egyptian army, led by Muhammad Naguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser, which staged a military coup that ignited the Egyptian revolution of 1952, rather than the Muslim Brotherhood. But he was spot-on about the shirts. During his reign as ‘King of Egypt and Sudan, Sovereign of Nubia, of Kordofan and of Darfur’, Farouk amassed more than a thousand bespoke suits, alongside museum-worthy collections of rare stamps and coins — at 8,500 pieces,