Complex sentence: Tales of his eccentric behaviour are legion and many of them appear to have more than a smattering of truth; but despite all of this, he was also a genuinely far-sighted educationalist, an unorthodox but successful entrepreneur, and a talented if unharnessed sportsman.
Split into simpler sentences: Tales of his eccentric behaviour are legion and many of them appear to have more than a smattering of truth. But he was also a genuinely far-sighted educationalist, an unorthodox but successful entrepreneur, and a talented if unharnessed sportsman.