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Colourfully narrates a bizarre three-day extravaganza thrown by Iran’s Pahlavi dynasty, alleged at the time to have cost hundreds of millions of dollars. The event, attended by leaders from around the world, ultimately helped to precipitate the Shah’s downfall. 

The Shah’s Party captures Iran’s oil-rich boom years, before the Islamic Revolution, during which its economy grew faster than at any other time. In 1971, eight years before the imperial dynasty fell, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and his glamorous wife, Farah Diba, hosted one of the largest gatherings of world leaders ever, celebrating the 2,500th anniversary of the Persian monarchy. But this stranger-than-fiction event, staged in a tented city by the ancient ruins of Persepolis, came amidst a rise in leftist agitation and a turn towards political Islam. 

Ruhollah Khomeini, then an obscure mullah living in exile in Iraq, began a relentless campaign against the imperial family. A skilled populist, Khomeini tapped into growing inequalities and resentments to push his theocratic vision, particularly among those who had left the countryside in search of work. The Shah’s autocratic style played poorly in a world increasingly concerned with human rights. The Persepolis party became a symbol of Iran’s regime, allowing the Shah’s critics to portray him as brutally repressive and out of touch with the struggles of ordinary people. Khomeini’s novel religious populism and his mastery of messaging steamrollered the Shah; he left it too late to move towards democracy, losing the support of his army, his people and his allies. Instead, the Iranian Revolution marked decades of ever-worsening repression.

This is a tale of extravagance, hubris and tragedy; of a king determined to drag his country into the modern world, yet trapped in dreams of personal glory and power and challenged by a region in turmoil; and of how trickles of dissent built, within a decade, into a revolutionary torrent.