In 1955 the winds of change were beginning to blow across the sultanate of Oman, a hitherto truly medieval state.
Rumours of subversion mingled with the unsettling smell of oil to propel the Sultan on a royal progress across the desert hinterland, from his southern capital of Salala to the northern capital of Muscat. It was an historic journey – the first crossing of the Omani desert by motorcar. Jan Morris accompanied His Highness Sultan Said bin Taimur as a professional observer, and was inspired by the experience to write her major work of imperial history, the Pax Britannica trilogy.
‘A minor literary masterpiece.’ New Statesman
‘The book is a hymn to a lost culture and a lost society; romantic without being sentimental, often extremely funny and brilliantly observed. It is the work of a great travel writer incapable of producing a trite or ungainly sentence.’ Daily Telegraph
Melancholy but Marvellous
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...
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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...
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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...
Read moreConundrum | Chapter 7: Rescued – a grand love . . .
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...
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