After enjoying universal adulation at Eton for his good looks, sporting prowess and wit, he was examined for a scholarship to Balliol. Languid, charismatic, casually erudite, and, in his charming way, a bit of a shit, Denys (as Wheeler calls him) made fecklessness into an art form.
He was, as his biographer puts it, ‘as bald as a billiard ball’. Denys differed from Robert Redford in one important particular. The image most of us have of him, then, is of a tanned and sunny Robert Redford heading non- chalantly to his doom in a Gypsy Moth. That we know of him now is largely down to his long and tortured love affair with the ill-starred Danish coffee-farmer Karen Blixen, who under the pen name of Isak Dinesen described their relationship in Out of Africa.
‘And don’t let anybody tell you different.’ Denys Finch Hatton - who was born into the English aristocracy in 1887, and died in a plane crash in Africa not long after his 44th birthday - was one of the great farters-around of all time. ‘We are here on earth to fart around,’ that wise man Kurt Vonne- gut once wrote.
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