{"id":1527,"date":"2007-07-05T18:17:22","date_gmt":"2007-07-05T22:17:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/07\/05\/best-obituary-ever\/"},"modified":"2007-07-05T18:17:22","modified_gmt":"2007-07-05T22:17:22","slug":"best-obituary-ever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/07\/05\/best-obituary-ever\/","title":{"rendered":"Best. Obituary. Ever."},"content":{"rendered":"<p><i>(from the Telegraph)<\/i>:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Count Gottfried von Bismarck, who was found dead on Monday aged 44, was a louche German aristocrat with a multi-faceted history as a pleasure-seeking heroin addict, hell-raising alcoholic, flamboyant waster and a reckless and extravagant host of homosexual orgies.<\/p>\n<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" class=\"left\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-content\/uploads\/snipshot_e4dkuageslm.jpg?w=525\" alt='snipshot_e4dkuageslm.jpg' \/>The great-great-grandson of Prince Otto, Germany&#8217;s Iron Chancellor and architect of the modern German state, the young von Bismarck showed early promise as a brilliant scholar, but led an exotic life of gilded aimlessness that attracted the attention of the gossip columns from the moment he arrived in Oxford in 1983 and hosted a dinner at which the severed heads of two pigs were placed at either end of the table.<\/p>\n<p>When not clad in the lederhosen of his homeland, he cultivated an air of sophisticated complexity by appearing in women&#8217;s clothes, set off by lipstick and fishnet stockings. This aura of dangerous &#8220;glamour&#8221; charmed a large circle of friends and acquaintances drawn from the jeunesse dor\u00c3\u00a9e of the age.<\/p>\n<p>Many of them knew him at Oxford, where he made friends such as Darius Guppy and Viscount Althorp and became an enthusiastic, rubber-clad member of the Piers Gaveston Society and the drink-fuelled Bullingdon and Loders clubs. Perhaps unsurprisingly he managed only a Third in Politics, Philosophy and Economics.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>full obit is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/news\/main.jhtml?xml=\/news\/2007\/07\/04\/db0402.xml\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<div class=\"syndication-links\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>(from the Telegraph): &#8220;Count Gottfried von Bismarck, who was found dead on Monday aged 44, was a louche German aristocrat with a multi-faceted history as a pleasure-seeking heroin addict, hell-raising alcoholic, flamboyant waster and a reckless and extravagant host of homosexual orgies. The great-great-grandson of Prince Otto, Germany&#8217;s Iron Chancellor and architect of the modern &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/07\/05\/best-obituary-ever\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Best. Obituary. Ever.&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1527"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1527\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}