Caped crusader

A photospread in The Scotsman on distinctive dressers includes the flamboyant Edinburgh University historian Owen Dudley Edwards, who explains: "I'm wearing a deerstalker which I bought in Dublin; the cape came from a friend, a professor of American history. It's really an Inverness cape which he said he didn't want to wear in case he made a fool of himself. I assured him that I didn't mind making a fool of myself so he bestowed it on me."

He adds that he doesn't agree with fashion at all: "It's dreadfully bourgeois and everybody tries desperately to look like everybody else, driving themselves bananas in order to try to discover what some half-drunk idiot on the Left Bank in Paris can try and swindle the public with now."