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the Pax Britannica trilogy, [12] 38; Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, [58] 85; Conundrum, [61] 12; Venice, [82] 81

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Gloriously Over-the-top

Harry Cochrane on Jan Morris, Venice

Jan Morris loved to provoke. Though she wrote elsewhere of nationalities as a ‘cruel pretence’, she was not above outrageous generalization or outrageous distinction – in this case, between the sexes. Of all Venice’s visitors, she observes, ‘the British seem to me to provide the best of the men (often distinguished, frequently spare, sometimes agreeably individualist) and the worst of the women (ill tempered, hair unwashed, clothes ill fitting, snobby or embarrassingly flirtatious)’.

Conundrum | Chapter 7: Rescued – a grand love . . .

Jan Morris, Conundrum

Love rescued me from that remote and eerie capsule, as it rescued me from self-destruction, and everything they say about love, in dicta sublime as in lyric abysmal, is demonstrably true. I have loved people with disconcerting frequency all of my life, but I have enjoyed one particular love of an intensity so different from all the rest, on a plane of experience so mysterious, and of a texture so rich, that it overrode from the start all my sexual ambiguities, and acted like a key to the latch of my conundrum.

Dominion over Palm and Pine

David Gilmour on Jan Morris, the Pax Britannica trilogy

When people ask me what they should read about the Empire, I suggest they go to the five volumes of the Oxford History of the British Empire, where they will find a mass of recent research synthesized in scores of scholarly essays written by contemporary academic historians. But if they want to sense what the Empire was like, how it felt and smelt and looked, if they want to picture traders of the Hudson Bay Company with their beaver hats and sledges or Boer trekkers lumbering across the veld in their great ox-wagons – then I advise them to read James Morris.

From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves | Jan Morris, Conundrum

How James Morris finally became Jan is an extraordinary story, and her memoir Conundrum is a gripping and thought-provoking read which casts fascinating light on the fevered debates of today. Read on for an extract from Chapter 15 where we join James at his beloved home Trefan in Wales where he spends one last summer living as a man before heading for Casablanca to meet the magician . . .

A Leap into the Light

Derek Johns on Jan Morris, Conundrum

I first met Jan Morris in the offices of the publisher Random House in New York in the early 1980s. I was a junior editor there, and was invited to meet someone I considered to be one of the most intriguing writers I had read. This was nothing more than a handshake and an acknowledgement of our shared Britishness in New York. But I was immediately struck by Jan’s warmth and affability, qualities that are key to her genius for talking to people and drawing stories from them. (For while Jan is less of an extrovert in person than in her writings, and indeed in some ways is quite reserved, she nonetheless possesses a remarkable ability, surely learned in the world of journalism, to nose out a story.)

Melancholy but Marvellous

Ariane Bankes on Jan Morris, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere

The capital of nowhere – could anywhere be more tantalizing? For those of us increasingly blasé or wary about visiting ‘somewheres’ the world over, many of them the target of hordes of other tourists hellbent on pleasure (and often compromising the particular qualities of their destination in the process), nowhere sounds the ultimate place to go. And, as it turns out, this place does have its own geographical co-ordinates, and is even accessible by public transport. It’s just that on arrival you may experience a sudden sense of dislocation, an overwhelming wistfulness for an elusive past, and a present that feels curiously like limbo. For in the words of its chronicler, Jan Morris, in Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (2001), the Mediterranean port ‘stands above economics, or tourism, or science, or even the passage of ships, or if not above them, apart from them’.

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