Need a new identity? Then get a beard. A luxuriant Mosaic chin warmer helped Radovan Karadzic, the fugitive Serb leader, dodge a war crimes trial for 12 years. John Darwin, the fraudster who faked his death at sea, also grew a beard – a stragglier one, appropriate to a small-time crook who had conned an unambitious £250,000 out of insurers.

The other lesson for would-be fugitives is that you need not flee abroad. That way you can evade international justice and keep your carbon footprint low, too. Having reinvented himself as Dragan Dabic, Mr Karadzic even drank regularly in a Belgrade bar that displayed a photograph of him as the smooth-chinned ethnic cleanser of yore. There he performed on the gusle – a one-stringed Serb fiddle – in Balkan jollifications ripe for parody in Borat: The Sequel.