ABSTRACT
In the speculation following the death of Princess Diana in a car crash in August 1997, one conspiracy theory declared that her sexual relationship with an Arab had become such an embarrassment and threat to the Royal Family that she needed to be removed. The rumour that she was pregnant by Dodi al Fayed, who died with her, demonstrated that fear of miscegenation was alive and well. Back in 1923, the death of another multi-millionaire Egyptian ‘playboy’ was also front-page news, as was the ‘unsavouriness’ of miscegenation - in this instance, the marriage of twenty-two-year-old Ali Kamel Bey Fahmy to thirty-two-year-old French woman Marie Marguerite. In the early hours of 10 July 1923, during a violent thunderstorm, Mme Fahmy shot her husband dead in London’s Savoy hotel.
