Too Close to the Sun

Conservationist, scholar, soldier, white hunter and fabled lover - Denys Finch Hatton was an aristocrat of leonine nonchalance. He was 6 foot 3 inches tall, and once lifted a car out of a ditch unaided. After a dazzling career at Eton and Oxford he sailed in 1910 for British East Africa - still then the land of the pioneer. There, concluded his obituary in The Times, ''No one who ever met him, whether man or woman, old or young, white or black, failed to come under his spell ... He was different from everyone else. He always left an impression of greatness - there is no other word - and aroused interest as no one else could.'' ''Too Close to the Sun'' is a story of big guns and small planes, princes from England and sultans from Zanzibar, a famous divorce case, a Welsh castle and a Gilbertine priory, marauding lions, syphilis, bankruptcy, self-destruction and the tragedy of the human heart. Sara Wheeler reveals the truth behind Finch Hatton''s love affairs with the glamorous aviatrix Beryl Markham and with Karen Blixen, the Danish coffee-farmer who famously immortalised their romance in her memoir Out of Africa. Wheeler tracks her quarry from a dreamlike Edwardian childhood in a Lincolnshire mansion through to the purgatorial battlefields of the East Africa Campaign - one of the last remaining untold stories of the First World War. As with her biography of Apsley Cherry-Garrard, she uses a biography to illuminate a generation. An elusive hero in the mythic story of the British settlers in East Africa, Finch Hatton was the open road made flesh. He crashed his Gypsy Moth into the Voi hills in 1931, dying ''as he would have chosen in the open air, amid the wide spaces that he loved, fearless and free to the end''.