Book description
Conservationist, scholar, soldier, white hunter and fabled lover -
Denys Finch Hatton was an aristocrat of leonine nonchalance. After a
dazzling career at Eton and Oxford, he sailed in 1910 for British East
Africa - still then the land of the pioneer. Sara Wheeler reveals the
truth behind his love affairs with the glamorous aviatrix Beryl
Markham, and - famously - with Karen Blixen, a romance immortalised in
her memoir Out of Africa.
'No one who ever met him', his Times obituary concluded,
'whether man or woman, old or young, white or black, failed to come
under his spell'.
Sara Wheeler's books include the international bestseller
Terra
Incognita: Travels in Antarctica
, of which the
Telegraph
reviewer wrote, 'I do not think there will ever be a better book on the
Antarctic.'
The Magnetic North
:
Notes from the Arctic Circle
was chosen as Book of the Year by Will Self, Michael Palin, A. N.
Wilson and others. Sara's latest book is
Access All Areas: Selected
Writings 1990-2010
.
She has published two biographies of travellers:
Cherry: A Life of
Apsley Cherry-Garrard
, and
Too Close to the Sun: The Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton
, and was immensely relieved to write about women at last in
O My America!
. She lives in London.
