I was walking down London's Cecil Court-the haunt of people of slightly Aspergerish disposition who collect rare, though not the very rarest, books- yesterday, when I stopped at the window of a seller of banknotes from around the world. I have always liked banknotes as physical artefacts, and have kept one or two from the foreign countries that I have visited (I am not so much a collector as an accumulator).

There was displayed in the window what was called "The Tyrant Collection": six colorful banknotes marked with the portraits of various tyrants. It was cheap and I decided to buy it, which is really against my principles. Normally, I keep only banknotes of the countries I have visited, from the time I have visited them. Among them, of course, are banknotes with portraits of tyrants: Baby Doc, Julius Nyerere, Mobutu Sese Seko.

I went in. A very pleasant lady asked me whether she could help me. I asked whether the Tyrant Collection were still available. She said that it was, and then turned to the other assistant in the shop.

"Can you pass me a Tyrant?" she asked, and he did so in a transparent plastic envelope.

Among the things I accumulate are striking utterances that express a great deal in a few words, and among them now, engraved on my mind, is "Can you pass me a Tyrant?" Could anything better express the fleetingness, the vanity, the absurdity, of great power? Furthermore, it told me that the Tyrant Collection was, relatively speaking no doubt, a commercial success, and that I was far from alone in my taste.

"Are you a tyrant yourself, sir?" asked another customer.

"No, sir," I replied, "I am not."

"An aspiring tyrant, perhaps?"

I told my fellow-customer that I was not an aspiring tyrant.

"A domestic tyrant, then?"

"My wife is with me, she can answer for me."

If I had been a tyrant I should, of course, have said "She must answer for me."

In addition to the tyrants in the collection-Idi Amin Dada, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Saparmurat Niazov, Saddam Hussein, Mao Tse Tung, and the one who makes the others seem like soulmates of Rand Paul, Kim Il Sung-I bought the last banknote issued under Colonel Ghadaffi's regime, with a picture of the Colonel himself, dressed oddly as ever, with a kind of sheet over his head almost like a medieval wimple, à la Rogier van der Weyden or Roger Campin. Neither could I resist a banknote for Zimbabwean $50,000,000,000,000. Oddly enough, I remember a time when the Zimbabwean dollar was worth as much as the US dollar, and the design of the banknote had changed comparatively little since then: I have it still.

To read the complete article, see:From Sir, With Love(takimag.com/article/from_sir_with_love_theodore_dalrymple#axzz30zAWjeYy)