Fit for a King: the Royal Garage of the Shahs of Iran
BORZON SEPASI, Dalton Watson, £110, ISBN 978 1 85443 292 6
We’re accustomed to thinking of Iran as an Islamic republic, so it’s worth remembering that until the 1979 Revolution it had been ruled by monarchs for 2500 years. Not surprisingly, those monarchs liked to surround themselves with nice things – and, with the arrival of the automobile age, those nice things included cars.
The first car to arrive in Iran was a 10hp Gardner-Serpollet, which caught the eye of the then-Shah (‘Shah’ literally means ‘king’ in Farsi) during a trip to Paris in 1900. But it wasn’t until a former soldier, Reza Khan Pahlavi, staged a coup and declared himself the new Shah in 1925 that expensive luxury cars started to arrive at the royal palace in droves. In 1921, Reza Khan had been driving a Model T Ford; four years
