He wore diamonds to the theatre, forgot his lines on stage, and was booed off by audiences who came purely to laugh at him -- and yet Robert Coates became one of the most talked-about figures in Regency England. This is the extraordinary true story of a man so gloriously, catastrophically devoted to the idea of himself as a great performer that he turned his own failure into a kind of fame. Known across London as Romeo Coates and Diamond Coates, this self-styled Amateur of Fashion crashed ...