At the dawn of the 1960s, John Duncan Miller, a Cambridge graduate and finance mogul nearing retirement, former Washington correspondent for the Times and with a past in the British intelligence services in the American capital, finds himself sailing off the coast of north-western Sardinia. 

On his return to London, word about the extraordinary and still unspoiled territories of Gallura spreads in the financial clubs of the Big Smoke. Listening to him is Prince Shah Karim Al Hussaini, a Harvard alumnus, a horse racing and skiing fanatic (in 1964 he will represent Iran in the Winter Olympics in Innsbruck) with a history PhD on sight that had vanished just a few years earlier.