Sir Ranulph Fiennes reached the summit of Everest at the age of 65. After eight years in the military, including a period with the SAS (from which he was dismissed, having plotted to blow up a temporary dam built by 20th Century Fox for the 1967 film, Doctor Dolittle), he set out on a lifetime of adventures, any one of which would have been remarkable. With Charles Burton he was the first to reach both poles by surface travel, with Mike Stroud the first to cross Antarctica unsupported on foot. In 2000, impatient with a surgeon’s advice to allow his frostbitten fingertips time to demarcate, he cut the blackened ends off himself with a fret saw (the thumb took him two days). He kept the digits in a Kodak tin.

Few lives have demonstrated such a revealed preference for risk

Few lives have demonstrated such a revealed preference for risk

Shortly after a heart attack and a coronary bypass graft, he ran seven marathons in seven days across seven continents, saying that in retrospect it was a bad decision. The allure is lost on me, but people find adventure in unlikely places. Two years before Everest, he climbed the North Face of the Eiger. Ranulph Fiennes, 3rd Baronet, has a fear of heights.Two years ago, Fiennes vanished. Care Inspectorate Wales, in an email obtained by the Telegraph, said he’d been unlawfully deprived of his liberty.........

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