William Dalrymple at the Festival

At Dalrymples talk at the Oxford Literary Festival after waiting in the snow for a bus; being driven comfortably enough from Wallingford to Oxford on the X40; and then queuing for five minutes or so before gaining entry to the Sheldonian to hear him.

So, I was not in a good mood when I shuffled into the cheapest seats in the back row - flat boards with no backrest.

But Dalrymple was a good story teller albeit with a somewhat loud and grating delivery.  He described the debacle of the first Afghan War, driven by the greed of the East India Company and its shareholders; the drawing room arguments of a conservative right wing in the UK; an army  and led by incompetents and supported by a British Government that ignored intelligence that said the great rival Imperial Russia was nowhere near the Afghan borders but chose to act on a single piece of evidence of the sighting of a troop of Cossacks.

The British Invasion was initially successful in spite of losses incurred due to heat not enemy bullets. One year of peace and polo followed the installation of a puppet king. The right wing celebrated and scoffed at liberal wets. The army relaxed in its indefensible cantonment. But then the spark of a single indiscretion, by a British officer with a young woman claimed by a tribal leader, set alight a massacre and a disorganised retreat of the British . And the rest is history.

It was Dalrymple's guess that Afghanistan would descend into a form of civil war with the Taliban strong in rural districts in the south and a government and its tribal allies ensconced in growing, modernizing urban areas and Internet savvy youth around increasingly populous cities, and in the north. The Chinese, he thought, already deeply invested in mineral activities backed up by spending on road and rail to service its mines, would  'conquer' the  country without firing a single shot. Hmm.

As I say, a good story teller but  an analyst of uncertain quality.  I wouldn't know.