Long before he was swinging lightsabres and dispensing nuggets of pseudo-Buddhist wisdom as Jedi master Obi-Wan Kenobi, Sir Alec Guiness played the idealistic young textile scientist Sydney Stratton in the 1951 Ealing comedy ‘The Man in the White Suit’ whose discovery of a new type of textile fibre promises to revolutionise the world. But I’ve always wondered whether, thanks to real life textile scientist William Astbury and his ‘monkeynut coat’, this classic film may well have been a case of art mirroring life…