Robert Templer, "The Shah's Party: And the Iranian Revolution That Followed (Hurst, 2026)

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So if you're lucky enough to find that person, never let go.

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**Nicholas Gordon** (1:30)
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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In 1971, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi threw a party to celebrate the 2,500-year anniversary of the Persian Empire. It was planned to be a massive celebration, with tents set up in the desert and invitations sent to just about every world leader across both the Western and Soviet blocs. Robert Templer writes about the celebration and how it presaged the events of the Iranian Revolution in his new book, The Shah's Party and the Iranian Revolution That Followed. Robert is a writer and former professor at the Central European University where he also founded a research center on post-conflict recovery. From 2007 to 2012, he was director of the Asia Programme at the International Crisis Group and is in Iran on so many occasions. He is the author of four books, one of the acclaimed, Shadows and Wind, A View of Modern Vietnam, and A Basilisk Glance, Poisoners from Plato to Putin. So Robert, thanks so much for coming on the show today and talk about your book, The Shah's Party. We should probably start with this question, what exactly was this party and what was it meant to celebrate?

**Robert Templer** (2:50)
Well, it was the culmination of essentially a year of festivities aimed at celebrating the 2,500th anniversary of the founding of the Persian Empire by Cyrus the Great. But it was much more than that because it was really Iran's coming out party onto the world stage.
And that's certainly how the Shah of Iran saw it. He wanted to assert a growing regional authority in the Middle East and also a growing place on the world stage.

**Nicholas Gordon** (3:27)
And maybe we can talk a bit more about the Shah himself.
He's one of these characters who, I think he's on the book, kind of sparks strong opinions in either direction. But how would you describe who he was?

**Robert Templer** (3:45)
Well, he was a complicated man with some very sort of divergent ideas. He was deeply religious in his own way. He really believed he had been put on the throne of Iran by a higher power. He was enormously confident. He was even arrogant about some of his own abilities. Yet at the same time, quite a shy man who was socially a little bit awkward in certain ways.
He was passionate about his country, but obsessed by his own sort of position in the world. He was very sensitive to any sort of diplomatic snub or any effort to diminish him by any rivals. He was unfortunately not a confident man, and he was often unwilling to surround himself with the best people.
I think that was possibly one of his greatest flaws in that he tended to regard himself as more knowledgeable about the international system than anyone, more able to direct the economy of Iran, more knowledgeable about the Iranian people. But of course, you can never be that knowledgeable about everything. And that's often where these sorts of leaders who centralize power among themselves fall down, and that they take on too much, and they regard their own opinions too highly.