Story of the headhunters' queen

Philip Eade (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20)

This is a carefully written biography of a bizarre woman, whose life story would be considered unbelievable if it appeared even in the most melodramatic novel. Eade is guilty of exaggeration only in the title, since Sylvia Brooke was never actually a queen, and the headhunters had practically petered out by the time her husband Vyner took over as the Rajah of Sarawak. The subtitle, An Outrageous Englishwoman and Her Lost Kingdom, is nearer the mark.

The idea of a white rajah with absolute rule over 500,000 Malays, Chinese, and Dyak headhunting tribes seems incredible, and so do the weird sexual habits of the English upper-class, but it all seems to be based on solid research, including the Brooke letters at Rhodes House, Oxford, as well as correspondence inherited by Sylvia's descendants, the Esher family, at Newington, near Watlington. Eade also used Sylvia's own autobiography, but discovered it to be semi-fictional.

After their marriage, the couple moved to a house in Stanton Harcourt owned by their friend Lord Harcourt of Nuneham Courtenay, a Government minister whose penchant for sexual harassment would have made headlines nowadays. Vyner reared turkeys at Stanton Harcourt, created a garden which was open to the public and joined the village cricket team.

Even after he succeeded to the title, they spent at least half the year in England, timing their arrival in Britain for the beginning of the hunting season, and they were out of the country when the Japanese invaded in 1941. It was the beginning of the end, and in 1949 the British Government started paying the Brookeses and their children a pension in perpetuity, in exchange for giving up their kingdom to the British Empire - itself on the way out.