Arabian Motorcycle Adventures review: enthralling and constantly surprising

There were great numbers of young men who had never been in a war and were consequently far from unwilling to join in this one.(Thucydides, 5th century BC)

I love that quote, inscribed on the walls of the Imperial War Museum, because it tells you so much both about the reason wars happen and about the nature of men. Most of us go through a phase where we think it would be terribly exciting to ‘see the elephant’. And for a lucky few, it’s everything they hoped it would be and more.

One of those lucky few is an extraordinarily jammy sod called Matthew VanDyke. By rights this young American filmmaker from Baltimore ought to be dead a thousand times over. Instead, rather more by luck than judgment, he not only survived six months in a Benghazi prison in which he could hear his neighbours being tortured to death, but also several weeks as an active combatant (for the rebel side) in the notoriously vicious and unpredictable Libyan civil war.

Since his adventures were turned into an award-winning Storyville documentary The Arabian Motorcycle Adventures (shown on BBC4 the other week, still viewable on iPlayer and highly recommended), Vandyke has come in for a lot of stick from critics for being a cold-eyed, narcissistic, irresponsible, selfish thrill-seeker who put his yearning for adventure and fame before the needs of either his loved ones or those oppressed Libyans whose cause he professed to champion. To which my response is, ‘Yeah. And?’

Indeed, it’s a criticism so utterly fatuous it’s like writing off When We Were Kings because of the insufficiently Corinthian spirit displayed in it by Muhammad Ali. Or like rejecting Man on Wire on the grounds of its being unbalanced by its hero’s monomaniacal obsession with walking across a wire strung between two high buildings.