[51] Lampson personally favored deposing Farouk and putting his cousin Prince Muhammad Ali on the throne in order to keep the Wafd in power, but feared that a coup would destroy the popular legitimacy of Nahas.

[46] The Wafd ran a powerful patronage machine in rural Egypt and the enthusiastic response of the fellaheen to the king as he threw gold coins at them during his tours of the countryside was viewed by Nahas as a major threat.

[69] The royal wedding made Farouk even more popular with the Egyptian people, and he dissolved parliament for elections in April 1938 with the full prestige and wealth of the Crown being used to support parties opposed to the Wafd.

[82]Farouk was greatly upset in 1940 when he learned that his mother, Queen Nazli, whom he viewed as a rather chaste figure, was having an affair with his former tutor, Prince Ahmed Hassanein, who as a desert explorer, poet, Olympic athlete and aviator, was one of the most famous Egyptians alive.

[77] When Farouk caught Hassanein reading passages from the Koran to his mother in her bedroom, he pulled out a handgun and threatened to shoot them, saying "you are disgracing the memory of my father, and if I end it by killing one of you, then God will forgive me, for it is according to our holy law as you both know".

[92] At the same time in 1941 that Rommel was inflicting a series of defeats on the British in the Western Desert, Farouk wrote to Adolf Hitler promising him that when the Wehrmacht entered the Nile river valley, he would bring Egypt into the war on the Axis side.

[93] The American historian Gerhard Weinberg wrote that the fact that Farouk wanted to see his country occupied by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany was not a sign of great wisdom on his part, but rather because he never understood "that Axis rule of Egypt was likely to be far more oppressive than British".

[124] Lampson in a dispatch to Sir Anthony Eden, who was once again Foreign Secretary, argued that Egypt needed political calm and to allow Farouk to dismiss Nahas would cause chaos as the latter would start "ranting" against the British.

[129] In November 1943, Farouk went driving with Pulli in his red Cadillac to Ismalia to see a yacht he just purchased when he was involved in an automobile incident when his attempt to bypass a British Army truck by speeding caused him to hit another car head-on.

[132] In late 1943, Farouk started a policy giving support to student and working men's association and in early 1944 paid a visit to Upper Egypt, when he donated money to victims of the malaria epidemic.

[139] The day before Farouk was tentatively due to be deposed, Prince Hassanein arrived at the British Embassy with a letter for Lampson saying: "I am commanded by His Majesty to inform Your Excellency that he has decided to leave the present Government in Office for the time being".

[157] Farouk had vaguely promised to carry out social reforms, a major concern in London as the wartime inflation had led to increases in support for the Egyptian Communist Party on the left and the Muslim Brotherhood on the right, and was willing to negotiate a new relationship with Britain.

[158] Moreover, once the war had ended, the Wafd had returned to its traditional anti-British political position, which led Whitehall to conclude that Farouk was London's best hope of keeping Egypt in the British sphere of influence.

[11] The authors of the study noted both bilharzia and ophthalmia were spread by waterborne parasitic worms, and the prevalence of both diseases could easily be eliminated in Egypt by providing people with safe sources of drinking water.

[165] In June 1946, Farouk granted asylum to Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who escaped from France where he was being held on charges of being a war criminal, arriving in Egypt on a forged passport.

[172] At the Royal Automobile Club in Cairo, Farouk engaged in all night gambling sessions with rich Egyptian Jews despite his professed anti-Zionism and often joked: "Bring me my Zionist enemies so I can take their money!

[183] In February 1949, the Supreme Guide of the Brotherhood, al-Banna, who called for Farouk's overthrow in response to the armistice with Israel, was shot by a Cairo policeman, and was taken to the hospital, where the police prevented him from receiving blood transfusions, causing his death later the same day.

[189] Thabet selected Narriman Sadek to be the new bride of the king, notwithstanding she was already engaged to Zaki Hashem, a PhD candidate in economics at Harvard University who was working in New York as a United Nations economist.

[196] In August 1950, Farouk visited France to stay at the casino at Deauville for his bachelor party, leaving Alexandria on his yacht Fakr el Bihar with an Egyptian destroyer as an escort and landed at Marseilles.

"[200] Finally, Farouk ended his bachelor party in San Remo in Italy where he purchased a number of Roman antiques at an auction to add to his collection and afterwards arrived in Alexandria in October 1950.

[206] In Turin, Farouk purchased from Fiat a $2 million US private train to ship back to Egypt complete with a TV, air-conditioning, 14 phones and alligator-trimmed furniture, which he took the press on during a trial run.

[220] Farouk's more responsible advisers like Hussein Serry Pasha together with Andraous of the "kitchen cabinet" tried their best to persuade the king to pose as the "just tyrant", but were constantly sabotaged by Pulli, Galhan and Thabet.

Thabet told Caffery that the prime minister's Fortunes Bill, which would require all past, present and future cabinet ministers to reveal the origins of their wealth would destroy the monarchy saying that by purging the Wafd a veritable Pandora's box would be open and Egypt would go through a Roman holiday of charges and counter-charges which could only result in the man-in-the-street becoming aware of the fact that he has been ruled by crooks of various colorations for at least the past ten years ... such an awareness could only result in a further deterioration of the King's reputation with the people for having held him responsible for the naming of such men to his Cabinets ... His conclusion was that Hilay Pasha must be discharged from office immediately.

[226] The popular rumour in Cairo had it that Ahmed 'Abbud, a Wafdist industrialist had paid a million Egyptian pound bribe to the king to sack Hilaly before he lost his monopoly on sugar production that he had bought from Nahas.

[234] When Farouk asked Serry to read out a list of who was involved in the conspiracy, he laughingly dismissed them as too junior to pose a threat, appointed his brother-in-law Ismail Chirine War Minister with orders to "clean up" the Army and returned to the Montaza Palace, unworried.

[233][234] The appointment of Chirine as War Minister spurred the Free Officers into action, and on 22 July their leaders, General Muhammad Naguib and Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, decided on a coup the next day.

[252] Farouk's obsession with collecting also ranged into diamonds, dogs, stamps, rubies, Fabergé eggs, ancient Tibetan coins, medieval suits of armour, aspirin bottles, razor blades, paper clips and Geiger counters.

[268] Farouk's daughter, Princess Ferial, recalled that in exile he was a loving father whose only rules for her as a teenager were that she never wear a dress that exposed any decolletage or dance to rock n' roll music, which he hated.

[269] In his last years, Farouk lived with Capece Minutolo, continued to visit nightclubs to gamble and socialise, and spent his days at the Café de Paris on Rome's Via Veneto, drinking coffee, smoking cigars and talking to anybody who approached him.

This adaptation sees Farouk recovering a jewel to maintain his standing in his home country, eventually succeed his father Fuad I of Egypt to the throne, and curb the influence of the nationalist Wafd Party.