That encouraged a stiff warning from Mr Wahid, a man who rarely settles for dull pronouncements.

ECONOMIST: Indonesia holds its breath | The

The man who said in 1994: "I don't pursue vendettas or punch people on the nose, " lit-up the dull 2001 general election by, well, punching a man on the chin.

BBC: The John Prescott story

At this man Ms Sereny probed away, searching for the process by which a dull, provincial Austrian policeman had become the murderer of perhaps a million persons, driven as she always is by her insatiable need to know.

ECONOMIST: German history