Doing nothing in particular very well

‘We are here on earth to fart around,’ that wise man Kurt Vonne- gut once wrote. ‘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.

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. 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. Denys differed from Robert Redford in one important particular. He was, as his biographer puts it, ‘as bald as a billiard ball’. He always wore hats.