Second paragraph of third section:

Sergeant Colon balanced on a shaky ladder at one end of the Brass Bridge, one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares. He clung by one hand to the tall pole with the box on top of it, and with the other he held up a home-made picture book to the slot in the front of the box.

I have very happy memories of first reading this while bouncing around the hills and valleys of North Macedonia in 2001 during the conflict there, which actually made it rather appropriate reading; I wrote then:

it is the story of a multiethnic diplomatic mission to a neighbouring, less developed country from the urban metropolis of Ankh-Morpork. As I met up with my Bulgarian, Romanian and American colleagues in Sofia, then proceeded to Skopje to rendezvous with our Greek, Turkish, Serb, Kosovar and Albanian comrades, before touring [North] Macedonia to find out what the hell was going on there, Pratchett’s satire took on a very hard edge for me. My Albanian colleague devoured the book on the day we travelled to Ohrid, though he confessed to some very understandable confusion about exactly who was a dwarf and who was not. Pratchett manages to give a gravely humorous treatment to some very serious themes.

I’m glad to say that I found it just as entertaining coming back to it a quarter-century later. Some of the puns are groan-worthy; some of the satire lands a bit better than other bits; but the core values of empathy and humanism (very much extending to the inhuman characters) are consistent, and there are some deep ideas about symbolism, community and identity. (Though there’s also a less successful sub-plot about the Watch falling to pieces in Ankh-Morpork while Vimes, Carrot and Angua are away in Uberwald.) Sure, these books are a formula; but it’s a good formula that can cope with varying the ingredients. You can get The Fifth Elephant here.