PARADISE FOUND
An island named after an insect infestation is surely no one’s first idea of paradise. Yet since the 1960s, Mustique has been just that: a privately owned, reassuringly inaccessible castaway retreat for the jet set. This tiny landmass in the Caribbean, little more than two square miles of sand and wild cows, was transformed into an expat colony of million-dollar beachside villas, a local shop stocked with caviar and a beach bar so iconic it was mocked-up for the wedding reception of the heir to the British throne.
As the meeting point of ancient aristocratic privilege and permissive-society decadence, it has become a byword for rock-star extravagance and royal misbehaviour, a model for the new lifestyle of the super-rich and the venue for a party to which everyone, whatever their background or aspirations, would accept an invitation. And behind it all was a single man: capricious, controlling and tyrannical, prone to rage, chaos and snobbery, and with no qualification apart from a sense of entitlement bred into him by the English establishment and his innately hedonistic, bohemian spirit. His story, and Mustique’s, suggests that if paradise can be found on Earth, it will have been built on money, geography and, above all, the force of human will.
Mustique was first recorded in the
