Well, I'm into my fourth (of four) of these "Afghanistan" books that I got from Octagon back in the early 90's, and I ran into a name that I was sure HAD to be made-up ... Mountstuart Elphinstone ... but I plug it into Google and there are pages of results on the guy, putting him exactly in the sort of situation that the excerpt attributed to him indicated! I guess "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar". However, the copious material out there on this guy deepens my doubts on the veracity of the previous books, as the stuff I looked into from those kept coming up empty.
Just another case of "assume" making an ass ...
