Dalrymple returns to the pages of the Spectator for the first time in three years to comment on the sight of “hundreds of books thrown out of a former library in Croydon on to the ground”. It reminds him of a similar sight in Liberia in 1991, and as a result, we get this wonderful passage that harkens back to his book Monrovia, Mon Amour and Anthony Daniels the intrepid traveler:

The capital city of Monrovia was in those days cut off from the rest of the country by the forces of Charles Taylor, and the only way to arrive was by the Steel Trader, a ship owned by a redoubtable old Africa hand, Captain Monty Jones, responsible, at his risk and profit, for revictualling the besieged city. On board was an American ex-marine, known to me only as Rambo, who sat on the stern looking for pirates to blow out of the water. (To his disappointment, they never materialised.) There was also Serge, a French mercenary who found life in France wearisome, and was engaged to train one of the Liberian parties to the civil war…