For many British people, Libya over the past four decades has been impossible to disentangle from the sinister despot who ruled over it. The Lockerbie outrage, IRA links, terrorist training camps and television images of the bizarrely uniformed Muammar Gaddafi railing at Western imperialism to huge crowds of seemingly adoring supporters made it a country that rarely featured as a holiday destination.
Now Gaddafi and his regime have been swept away by an extraordinary popular uprising, but for many, the doubts about Libya will persist. Whereas its eastern and western neighbours, the Egyptians and Tunisians, toppled their tyrants remarkably swiftly and without huge loss of life, the Libyans managed to rid themselves of the Gaddafi clan only after an extremely bloody civil war.
