Count Geoffrey Wladislas Vaile Potocki de Montalk (10 June 1903 – 14 April 1997) was a poet, polemicist, and pretender to the Polish throne.

[1] In 1926, de Montalk left his wife and small daughter in New Zealand to be a poet by "...follow(ing) the golden road to Samarkand".

He travelled to England but moved in 1949 to Draguignan in the south of France where he obtained land and a ramshackle stone cottage – the Villa Vigoni – deep in the Provençal countryside.

He was arrested after attempting to publish a manuscript of erotic translations of works by Rabelais and Verlaine, with three short bawdy verses of his own.

Though the manuscript had not actually been published, it had been shown to a printer at the Methodist Recorder in London who reported de Montalk to the police on the grounds of obscenity.

On 8 February 1932, he appeared before Sir Ernest Wild, Recorder of London at the Central Criminal Court and after a celebrated trial – at which he was supported by Leonard and Virginia Woolf and many of the leading writers of the day – he was sentenced to six months in Wormwood Scrubs.

When Edward VIII declared his intention to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson, against the wishes of Prime Minister Baldwin, and was forced to abdicate, Potocki de Montalk printed a manifesto supporting the King and chastising Baldwin, distributing copies in Downing Street and was arrested.

[3] The first issue of The Right Review, in October carried a statement of Potocki's own monarchist position: It is our aim to show that the Divine Right of Kings is the sanest and best form of government, being in the last resort the only fount of power and consequently of human life.