Owen Dudley Edwards, FRSE, FRHistS, FSA (Scot.) was born in Dublin in 1938, studied at Belvedere College (for reference to which, see James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), and University College, Dublin, then at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, subsequently teaching in the University of Oregon. He then worked as a journalist for a year in Dublin. He taught in the University of Aberdeen for two years (1966-68), and since then at the University of Edinburgh whence he retired in 2005 but where he still gives occasional lectures. His subject is History but he frequently trespasses into Literature.