‘Dynamite’ Douglas Latchford, an old Southeast Asia hand, got a lot of things wrong in his life but he could throw a party his guests wouldn’t forget in a hurry. They once enjoyed a brace of oiled Thai bodybuilders posing as ancient statues in nothing but loincloths and gold necklaces. I say Latchford got a lot of things wrong, but really it was the same thing over and over again. He helped himself to historic sculptures which he had no right to, and sold them to satisfy the cupidity of collectors and museums in the West. If he was a hedgehog, author Matthew Campbell is a fox. He knows many things, including what a former director of the Metropolitan Museum in New York had for breakfast (‘orange juice, three medium-boiled eggs, coffee, extra sweet’).

Latchford was born in Bombay in 1931, the son of a banker. Sent away to Brighton College in the grey years of rationing after the war, he pined for more colourful climes. He skipped university, following his brother to Bangkok, which in the late 1950s had a reputation as a first-rate place for second-rate people. Latchford was in the import-export business and developed an interest in the ancient Khmer civilisation, as well as in small but perfectly formed local beefcake. The world knows Angkor Wat, but other temples were also concealed by the steaming vegetation. 

At first for his own delectation and to advertise his credentials as a connoisseur, Latchford acquired stunningly rendered statues and reliefs from these sites without scrupling too much about how he came by them. He started to offer them to private buyers as well as prestigious auction houses and galleries