David Chaffetz at the Asian Review of Books:
A worldly Hungarian informed me in 1976, as I was leaving to take up a scholarship in Iran, “I was at the Shah’s 2,500 year celebration.” Astounded, I asked him what it was like. “Like something out of Buñuel”, he replied. Iran’s ruler had invited to him to the infamous coming out party because he had attended the Shah’s alma mater, Switzerland’s aristocratic Le Rosey. That already tells you a lot about the failings of the imperial regime, which today some wish to see returned to power. Readers of Robert Templer’s The Shah’s Party will be spoiled for choice to find motivations for the revolution of 1978 that drove the monarch into exile, in this Tristram Shandy-esque narrative of venality, sycophancy, ineptitude, hubris and cultural myopia. Yet as Templer makes clear, the Iranians enjoyed no monopoly on these shortcomings.
More here.
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