Ukraine’s next move: can Putin be outsmarted? (Even in adulthood, he was an enthusiastic thrower of bread rolls.) He went up to Brasenose, concentrated on gambling, showing off and smashing crockery, and was quite happy to come away with a Fourth. His was, in many ways, the classic disappointment of the Etonian who never gets over being popular at school. He didn’t get the scholarship, and seems to have decided, thereafter, that achieving things was a mark of vulgarity. Asked to write an essay saying what he’d do if he came into a million pounds, he wrote that he would pension off the older Balliol dons. 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.

Karen blixen and denys