During his rule of Uganda, the dictator Idi Amin wrecked the nation's economy, drove out tens of thousands of her citizens, and murdered hundreds of thousands more.

* During his rule of Uganda, the dictator Idi Amin wrecked the nation's economy, drove out tens of thousands of her citizens, and murdered hundreds of thousands more. Yet state documents recently released to Britain's National Archives show that the portly tyrant (who died a year and a half ago in Saudi Arabia) had a helpful side. In 1973, during one of the U.K.'s recurrent pre-Thatcher financial crises, he offered to rescue the British economy. He actually created a Save Britain Fund, encouraging ordinary Ugandans to make contributions. In one excited cable he told Her Majesty's government that: "Today, 21 January 1974, the people of Kigezi District donated one lorry load of vegetables and wheat. I am now requesting you to send an aircraft to collect this donation urgently before it goes bad." Receiving no satisfactory response to this and other magnanimous offers--including a later one to broker peace in Northern Ireland--Amin turned against Britain, awarding himself the title "Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa and Uganda in Particular." Amin was of course a monster, but it's hard to deny he had style. Of a sort.