W ILLIAM T REVOR Denys Finch Hatton was the man in the
aeroplane who disturbed Karen Blixen’s African solitude and hugely cheered her up. In the film that featured their romantic friendship Robert Redford didn’t look much like him and didn’t wear hats a lot, which Finch Hatton did, being vain about his baldness. Tall and imposing but humorous with it, he had charm to burn; so had Redford and, all in all, Out of Africa was a good enough film. But nothing like as good as Sara Wheeler’s Too Close to the Sun (Cape, £18.99), a stylish and meticulously researched account of the life and times of a fearless adventurer who now and again laid down his elephant gun and became a cultured, sensitive and rather remarkable man. Studded with nuggets of information about his background country house grandeur, Eton and Brasenose — and particularly illuminating about the exploitation of Africa before and during the 1914-18 war, this book is as impressive in its way as Wheeler’s remarkable Terra Incognita. I enjoyed it enormously.
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