Northern Ireland's opera-loving Unionist first minister, David Trimble, has been likened to Houdini for his last minute escapes from seemingly inevitable political disasters.
In fact, he has more in common with a performer on the slack high wire, stunning his audience with an ability to sway back and forth between extreme Protestant sectarianism and the moderate centre, while never falling - so far, at least. He even finds time to grasp the hands of Catholic republican nationalists as he staggers towards his destination.
As leader of the Ulster Unionists following the retirement of the Sir James Molyneux, it was Mr Trimble's surprise compromise with republican nationalists that made the 1998 Good Friday agreement possible.
The result was devolution, a prize long sought after by Unionists, and elections that installed Mr Trimble as first minister at the head of a shaky, bipartisan administration. For this commitment to peace, he won the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with John Hume, the former leader of the SDLP.
This was a curious triumph for a man who entered politics at the age of 29 in the ultra rightwing Vanguard Unionist party. As such he opposed theSunningdale agreement of a quarter century ago, which tried to bring peace along lines he campaigned for 20 years later.
He even stood as a Vanguard candidate against the moderate Northern Irish prime minister Brian Faulkner in 1973, promising "not to allow murderers and Quislings to destroy Ulster and hand it over to the republicans".
He went on to propose independence for Ulster and played an important strategic role in the Loyalist strike which brought down the power sharing executive in 1974.
Mr Trimble tempered his extremism soon after, joining the Ulster Unionists in 1978. His political profile sank below the horizon during the next dozen years which were spent as a law lecturer at Queen's University, Belfast.
He re-entered politics in 1990, still on the sectarian rightwing. With Ian Paisley and other Democatic Ulster Unionist candidates, he shouted abuse at Charles Haughey during the Irish prime minister's visit to Northern Ireland in April 1990.
The same month he was selected to contest the seat of Upper Bann following the death of its sitting MP, Harold McCusker. He was chosen partly to counter criticism that the UUP lacked articulate spokesmen.
In the byelection campaign he attacked Margaret Thatcher's bridge building Anglo-Irish agreement. Having won, he made a contentious maiden speech in which he claimed that the UUP were the "British national party in Ulster", formed "to combat Irish nationalism".
In the Commons he was an unremitting opponent of any talks with the Irish Republic, Sinn Fein or the IRA. With Mr Paisley, he greeted the IRA's ceasefire in August 1994 as a "sham" and a "tactical manoeuvre". He raised his profile in the runup to the UUP Leadership vote by backing the loyalist standoff at Garvaghy road, Drumcree, after the parades commission ruled the loyalist Orangemen could not march down the road, which runs through a republican housing estate.
But he did broker a limited march and joined Ian Paisley in celebrating their victory - a victory that placed him back at the forefront of politics in Ulster.
On Jim Molyneux's retirement of as leader of the UUP, Mr Trimble unexpectedly beat the perceived moderate and favourite, John Taylor. He offered to merge the UUP with Dr Paisley's DUP but was turned him down.
Having won the party leadership as a hardliner, he most unexpectedly emerged as a moderate. He urged Loyalist paramilitaries to disarm to outflank the IRA and asked the government to create a 90-seat Northern Ireland peace forum elected by the single transferable vote, the system used in the south of Ireland.
In British politics, he moved away from the Tory party, old Unionist allies, helping defeat the Conservatives on the Nolan report into sleaze and opposing John Major over the Scott report into arms sales. In October 1996 he became the first UUP leader to visit a Labour conference.
This belated flexibility was nowhere in his genes. His paternal grandfather, William Trimble, was in the Royal Irish Constabulary and was hunted down by Michael Collins' IRA.
Mr Trimble was born in Belfast in 1944, the son of two ministry of labour clerks. His biographer, Henry McDonald, says: "He grew up in a psychological atmosphere dominated by an ever-present state of siege and a sense of unbroken service to the British Crown."
His education in primary and grammar schools was in Bangor, but he returned to Queen's University in Belfast where he was awarded a first class honours in law. He was in the air cadets there but, at 17, he had already joined the Orange order and begun his career as a political battler.
Some 40 years later the battle is far from over. Two years after winning the Nobel Peace Prize his position as party leader was so weakened by rejectionists among Protestant unionists that in March 2000 he had to fight off a challenge for the leadership from the extreme Rev Martin Smyth MP.
In May 2000 he survived by just 56 votes after a "back me or sack me" speech. In September 2000 his party lost its safest seat, South Antrim, to Billy McCrea, an extreme hymn-singing Paisleyite, and a month later, he only survived as Ulster Unionist leader by promising to ban Sinn Fein from crossborder talks unless they increased the pace of arms decommissioning.
Through his political agility, Mr Trimble has often managed to make his opponents lean out to help him reach the centre. The British Government replaced Mo Mowlam as Northern Ireland secretary - first with Peter Mandelson and then John Reid - and eased up on the Patten reforms of the RUC. Even Sinn Fein has apparently pressed the IRA to speed up the beginning of its arms handover.
Flinty David Trimble shows no outward sign of the flexibility needed for this act. Uptight, irascible and tetchy, he is known for his bad temper. He is far from the stereotypical gladhanding, backslapping Irish professional politician. In fact, his aversion to the "touchy-feely" approach of Mrs Mowlam led him to ask Tony Blair to replace her.
What marks cerebral Mr Trimble out from his colleagues is that he is much brighter than those he dismisses as "wooden tops". He could see the advantages of being recognised as a "bridgebuilder" in such a divided society as Northern Ireland. But he dislikes being seen as the De Klerk of Northern Ireland: "I would much rather be the Mandela. De Klerk was the leader of a minority group that was frustrating the rights of the majority."
This openness to change has secured his place in history. Whether he stays to achieve a lasting peace in the province, or falls, with the honour of having tried, will determine if that place is in a footnote, or earns a chapter all of its own.