When the Libyan People's National Congress held its opening session this month the American guests were prepared for surprises. But even by Colonel Muammar Gadafy's unpredictable standards, his speech stunned the audience.
Instead of delivering the usual tirade denouncing the United States and the world in general, he denounced himself.
"No one separated Libya from the world community," he said. "Libya voluntarily separated itself. No one has imposed sanctions on us or punished us. We have punished ourselves."
In the audience, Susan Davis, a Californian member of Congress, was just listening at first but hurriedly pulled out a notebook. "What he was saying was so amazing that I started writing it down... I took 24 pages of notes."
Solomon Ortiz, a congressman from Texas, was equally impressed by the Libyan leader's 90-minute recantation. "I have lots of respect and admiration for a man who publicly admits his mistakes," he told reporters. "It takes a lot of guts to say what he said in front of all those people."
Colonel Gadafy, who dramatically announced just before Christmas that Libya was renouncing weapons of mass destruction, has always been a man of surprises. Whenever he travels abroad he is the centre of attention, wearing outlandish costumes that he has been known to change three times in one day, picking quarrels that deflate the pomposity of other leaders, or throwing money at crowds from his car window.
Even his name causes mayhem. There are at least 32 different ways to write it in English. Kazzafi, Gadhafi, Gheddafi, Qadhdhaafi - take your pick. Whatever the spelling, the name comes from a multipurpose Arabic verb meaning to fling, hurl, toss, push, shove, pelt, eject, oust, defame, slander, strafe or vomit.
It was in 1969, at 7am on September 1, that Muammar Gadafy first came to the world's attention. Wearing an army beret and looking a little apprehensive, he leaned towards the microphone and read out Communique Number One, which he had hastily scribbled in the radio station a few minutes earlier.
"People of Libya..." his broadcast began. "Your armed forces have undertaken the overthrow of the reactionary and corrupt regime, the stench of which has sickened us all... From this day forward, Libya is a free, self-governing republic."
King Idris, the ruler, was on holiday in Turkey when news arrived that he had been overthrown. Nobody was particularly surprised or sorry to see him go.
Aged 27, with a flashing smile and wiry black hair, Gadafy was undoubtedly good looking. If only the revolution had failed there and then, he might have been immortalised as a wall poster, as was Che Guevara.
But success was almost inevitable; the Cyrenaican Defence Force, who were supposed to protect the monarchy, stayed in their barracks and the Libyan public watched with indifference.
Without any serious opposition, the new regime had little on which to build a mythology of long and heroic struggle, so instead it cultivated an image of ordinariness.
Among the revolutionary memorabilia now in Tripoli museum, pride of place goes to a turquoise Volkswagen Beetle, circa 1967, registration number 23398 LB - the car that Gadafy used while plotting his coup.
A notice provided by the Department of Moral Guidance contrasts this "simple, normal and popular" vehicle with the Mercedes "moving between nightclub, gambling halls and military bases driven by agents of the Italians, Americans and British in the defunct regime".
It is the cult of ordinariness and the simple life that leads him to receive guests in his desert tent, or to fly planeloads of camels to international conferences and park them on hotel lawns so that he can drink their milk.
In fact, the more ordinary he tries to be, the less ordinary he seems. Gadafy is one of the world's most extraordinary ordinary men.
His list of offences is certainly a long one: Lockerbie, the UTA airliner bombing, the shooting of PC Yvonne Fletcher in London, the Berlin disco bombing, supplying arms to the IRA, plus various assassinations and human rights abuses internally.
But buffoonery may have saved him from the fate of other rogue Arab leaders such as Saddam Hussein. Comedians, even unintentional ones, can be difficult to demonise and therefore can get away with things that others can't.
His announcement that Libya would hand over the Lockerbie suspects for trial, delivered in an interview with John Simpson of the BBC, was a serious matter but that, too, raised a laugh. Gadafy turned up in a straw trilby-type hat which he was wearing sideways.
"I could even see the three little brass-rimmed ventilation holes over his forehead," Simpson recalled in his book, A Mad World, My Masters. None of Gadafy's officials dared to point it out and Simpson, feeling that the hat was "central to the character of the man", decided not to intervene.
Worse was to come when Simpson's cameraman played back the interview tape. The microphone clipped to the leader's chest had picked up repeated sounds of his intestinal gas escaping. It was broadcast, complete with background noise.
In 1970, four months after the coup that brought Gadafy to power, Jonathan Wallace interviewed him for Middle East Economic Digest - not in a tent but "in some sort of mad People's Office with people coming and going all the time".
"He was beginning to develop his theories, based on Rousseau," Wallace said. "It was totally idealistic, but soon after the revolution he was labelled a rogue leader in the Arab world and the west slammed the door in his face."
That, Wallace believes, forced him to look towards the Soviet Union. "The ideas in the Green Book were sound, but they were then Sovietised."
The famous three-volume Green Book, available in Arabic, English, French, Italian, Spanish and Russian, espouses a system of direct democracy - jamahiriyya - based on popular committees.
It's a work of political theory, certainly, though it reads more like the sort of thing a 15-year-old might write under the title "My plan to reform the world":
"Political struggle that results in the victory of a candidate with 51% of the votes leads to a dictatorial governing body disguised as a false democracy, since 49% of the electorate is ruled by an instrument of governing they did not vote for... this is dictatorship."
The result, in Libya, is many discussions and few decisions. Reuters correspondent Jonathan Wright attended one of the annual congresses and found it in chaos. "People had come with a large number of expensive demands - railways, universities, schools and roads," he recalled. "The ministers kept trying to tell them that they didn't have money to finance everything."
With no way to prioritise the demands, it resulted in several ministers being criticised and handing in their resignations.
New to Libyan politics at the time, Wright filed a government-in-crisis story, only to discover a few weeks later that all the ministers were still at their desks: it had just been an everyday performance of Libyan political theatre.
Like Saddam, Gadafy has tried his hand at writing fiction. Escape to Hell is a collection of short stories and essays bulked out by large type, generous margins and 15 inexplicably blank pages at the end.
One tells of an astronaut who returns to earth but cannot find work as a carpenter, plumber, etc, because he lacks the skills, so he kills himself. Another discusses whether death is male or female.
Most entertaining is the introduction, in which Pierre Salinger, the late President Kennedy's press secretary, tries to sound positive about the book - "fascinating", "an original mentality" - without making a fool of himself.
The original Arabic cover design, Salinger notes, was "art of the naive school" - hinting, perhaps, that this was entirely appropriate.
Mad, bad or just naive? Nobody knows for sure, and this is not the first time that Gadafy has promised to reform.
In 1988, he took charge of a bulldozer to ram the gates of Furnash prison in Tripoli and allow 400 prisoners out. A few days later, he tore up blacklists of suspected dissidents. But it did not last.
This time, though, many believe Gadafy really has turned a page.
"He wooed the Arabs for a number of years and wooed the Africans, and now he's wooing what he hopes is a more receptive market to the north," said James Lawday, director-general of the London-based Middle East Association, which promotes trade and investment in the region.
To Jonathan Wallace, who makes no secret of being a Gadafy fan, the change is something he planned all along.
"We do not have a nation in Libya," Gadafy told him in the 1970 interview. It would need a strong hand for a generation to weld together such a disparate collection of people and give them a national identity.
"I want to keep the revolution alive for a generation," Gadafy said, adding that he would then let the people decide what form of government they wanted.
Wallace asked exactly how long he meant by a generation, and Gadafy replied: "In our culture, a generation is 33 years."
Add 33 years to 1970 and the result is 2003 - the year that Gadafy apparently changed his ways.
Life in short
Born: 1942, Serte
Education: University of Libya, Benghazi
Family: Four sons and one daughter
Career: Served with Libyan army 1965-; chair, Revolutionary Command Council 1969- (head of state); commander in chief of armed forces 1969; prime minister 1970-72; minister of defence 1970-72; secretary general of General People's Congress 1977-79; chair OAU 1982-83; member, presidential council, Federation of Arab Republics 1972; rank of major general January 1976; retaining title of colonel
Publications: The Green Book (three volumes), Military Strategy and Mobilisation, The Story of the Revolution
Gadafy on disarmament: "Libya will urge states worldwide, especially in the Middle East and Africa, to end weapons of mass destruction programmes. We will help build a world free of mass destruction weapons and terrorism"
Gadafy in Malawi, July 2002: "No one will teach us democracy. We have our tradition, and we have our own democracy"