Michael Jackson’s moony marginalia

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Next week, Merseyside memorabilia specialist Omega Auctions is holding a sale of rock music artefacts, including photographic negatives of a 1975 Bob Marley concert, a leather jacket worn by Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy and Elvis Presley’s bedside Bible. Perhaps the hottest lot, however, is a copy of Robert Greene’s bestseller The 48 Laws of Power (1998), a self-help-ish tome that set out to assess the key factors by which the great figures of history obtained their clout. But this is no dog-eared paperback: this volume was once owned by none other than Michael Jackson, allowing us, says the auction house, ‘a fascinating insight into the thoughts and interests of the King of Pop’.

Jackson, it seems, was quite the fan of Greene’s work. This copy of the book is packed with the singer’s own annotations and notes – ‘including exclamations of “Wow”, “True” and “Great”’. And there’s more: ‘The Moon comes every night so people don’t care to look to the heavens,’ he writes at one point. The book is expected to fetch a tidy £8,000.

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