Robert Lacey — British Historian born on January 03, 1944,

Robert Lacey is a British historian and biographer. He is the author of a number of bestselling biographies, including those of Henry Ford,Eileen Ford and Queen Elizabeth II, as well as works of popular history... (wikipedia)

Saud bin Abd al-Aziz was the moon-faced, shortsighted, bespectacled son of the old founder of Saudi Arabia, who'd always been his father's protege but had never quite lived up to everything that his father had.
Fear generates anger, and fear generates violence, and those were part of what built the Saudi state.
What royal families are very good at doing is surviving and reinventing themselves. That's true whether it's a constitutional monarchy in Britain or an authoritarian monarchy.
It seems to me that Sotheby's is very much like the British monarchy: an old and apparently very venerable institution which is in fact very nimble on its feet, an institution invested with a great deal more self-interest than the public image would suggest.
I lived in Saudi Arabia in the late 1970s. It was, for a Westerner, pretty idyllic. There were the religious police; there were the rules; there were the prayer times. But it was as if we were existing in two separate universes. The Westerners were just allowed to get on with their way of life.