Aidan Hartley is a farmer, keen Shot and fisherman
A while back, Barnaby Rogerson, a publisher from the excellent Eland Books, asked me to write a new preface to Richard Meinertzhagen’s Kenya Diary, describing his soldiering experiences in this country between 1902 and 1906. Richard was a great diarist. Decades after the events of his exciting younger life, he brought out a sequence of edited papers covering his adventures in Africa, the Middle East and his Army years, as well as a memoir of the way he saw himself as a black sheep.
The first, edited version of his diary appeared in 1956 — and nearly 30 years later, John Hatt, Eland’s founder, reissued this volume with a preface by Elspeth Huxley.
Richard Meinertzhagen, noted Elspeth, “was a killer. He killed abundantly and he killed for pleasure. The diary of the five years
