The British Empire did a lot of expedient things--like let the Brook family who claimed Sarawak take up the authority of Rajas and style themselves as rulers so long as they remained within tolerable British parameters. The third generation of "white raja", Vyner, met his wife Sylvia at the community orchestra his mother (Ranee Margaret) had organized to try and find wives willing go to Borneo. Sylvia herself was from an eccentric Victorian family at the core of court life (her father was the organizer of the Queen's Jubilees and state ceremonies, and a close confidante), and the friend of J.M. Barrie and George Bernard Shaw when she wasn't being a catty pain in the ass. While in Sarawak, the Brook family fought each other, and modernization, with the result that they were bought off and deposed in 1946--unlike Brunei, which has similar gold and mineral assets, Sarawak had not been profitably exploited and the family quickly burned through their payoff with little to show for it. Eade improves upon Sylvia's own memoirs (she's quite an unreliable narrator) with family papers, foreign office documents and interviews, and the results are the kind of bizarre biography that makes Kipling's Man Who Would Be King plots a lot more reasonable.