There are evenings in Benghazi when the darkness of the dust storms rolling north out of the desert gets to town before the night edging south towards the land from the wintry Mediterranean. Then the grey dust thickens and slowly erases the detail of daytime from view - the advertising hoarding with the poster of Col Gaddafi torn down to reveal another, older poster of him underneath, or the faded elegance of the old Italian buildings around the port. Just before darkness finally comes, some trick of the desert sky gives the sea an eerie phosphorescent glow, as though the light were rising up from within. This is a country where fingernails are routinely ripped off, teeth smashed, lives ruined, hearts broken Radio 4: The Arab revolution It must have looked this way to generations of soldiers who slogged along this narrow coastal highway skirting the vast and forbidding distances of the deserts of North Africa. The wind and the sand have long since rubbed out their tracks of course - the British and Australians along with the Romans and Venetians. Every foreign ruler left a mark and a ghost of Italian culture survives in the way that instant coffee is proudly served with a crispy flourish of foamy milk as a cappuccino. And you know the British were here because they left behind their chunky, clunky three-pin electrical plugs and the practice of topiary - that strange habit of clipping and reshaping bushes in public parks until they look a bit like something else ...
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