VENICE

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a b McSmith, Andy (4 June 2008). "Love story: Jan Morris – Divorce, the death of a child and a sex change... but still together". The Independent. Archived from the original on 2 July 2008 . Retrieved 12 March 2010.

But just don't expect to finish it. You may well do. Or you may find, like I did, that your interest wanes after a while. Sudden coveys of youths" is rather marvellous phrasing. But much later, Chapter 21 hits a stride of particularly striking, almost too-rich descriptions: I ashamed to say I do read my own books quite a bit,” she says, and laughs. “There are one or two good things. But then you also feel, oh do please stop going on…” Shopland, Norena 'A tangle in my life' from Forbidden Lives: LGBT stories from Wales, Seren Books, 2017My review may be a little unfair, but reflects a level of disappointment with this book. I saw a TV programme on an Morris which I found fascinating. What a fabulous person, what an interesting life story and how many fantastic journeys she had made. I suppose a combination of being impressed by her talking about her life, and the reputation of this book, made me expect far better. Jan Morris at 90: she has shown us the world | Jan Morris". The Guardian. 2 October 2016 . Retrieved 23 November 2021. Do you think that Venice today would have inspired you to write about it with the feeling you had then?

Jan Morris naturalised as Welsh and wrote The Matter of Wales. Photograph: Colin McPherson/Corbis via Getty Images She adopted Wales — her father’s native country — as her beloved home, living on the Llŷn Peninsula. But, really, Morris belonged to nowhere in particular. She tendedto travel somewhere — Oxford, Venice or Trieste, for example — and stay put for a while, allowing her to develop a deeperunderstanding of a place, rather than bounce from one destination to another. Yes, I would like to have been asked if there was any moral purpose emerging from my 40-odd books, and I would answer yes, my gradually growing conviction that simple kindness should be the governing factor of human conduct.Elizabeth was moved to respond to Greer, writing: “I am not very silent and certainly not anguished. The children and I not only love Jan very dearly but are very proud of her.” I was embedded (as the Americans would say) in the 1953 Everest Expedition as correspondent of the Times, because that newspaper had traditionally supported attempts upon the mountain, and because I was young and fit. My task was to get news from the expedition exclusively home to London despite worldwide and sometimes dirty competition. It was nearly 200 miles from the mountain to the nearest cable station in Kathmandu, and we weren’t allowed long-distance radios, so I sent most of my dispatches by Nepali runners, whom I paid on a sliding scale according to the time they took to get there. However, I discovered that the Indian Army maintained a small radio unit some 40 miles from the mountain, keeping an eye on the nearby Tibetan frontier, and when the expedition succeeded they agreed to send a single message to Kathmandu for me. I could not tell them what it said, because, helpful though they were, it would in no time reach every newsroom in the world, so I devised a message which would seem to be clear but was really in code – to wit: SNOW CONDITIONS BAD ADVANCED BASE ABANDONED YESTERDAY AWAITING IMPROVEMENT – which in fact told the Times, and none of our competitors, that the summit of Everest had been reached on 29 May by the New Zealander Hillary and the Sherpa Tenzing. It was published in London on the very morning of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation – to my mind a last hurrah of the British empire. There is, I think, an easy explanation for the vast difference in quality and style between the two books. Trieste and The Meaning of Nowhere was written in 2002, one of her later works. The World of Venice, on the other hand, was written in 1960. I don't think she'd yet found her unique and lovely way of bringing together the eloquent travel essay, the quirks of history, and the expert tour guide into one unified whole. Kandell, Jonathan (20 November 2020). "Jan Morris, Celebrated Writer of Place and History, Is Dead at 94". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 21 November 2020 . Retrieved 21 November 2020.

Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards 2018 winners". Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards. 1 February 2018. Archived from the original on 12 August 2018 . Retrieved 11 August 2018. Do we not know them well, whenever we live, the aesthetic conservers on the one hand, the men of change on the other? Which of these two philosophies is the more romantic, I have never been able to decide." (The City: 22) The silver reliquary of St Nicholas [in Bari] ...has for nine centuries consistently exuded a liquid Holy Manna of such purity as to be indistinguishable from the purest spring water." (The Lagoon: 30) Both books now read as unintended valedictions for a long interlude of optimism, for, as Trieste was at the printers, Morris circled the globe in search of the zeitgeist; “everywhere people were fed up with being bullied by other cultures, or of other cultures coming in”. She returned to Wales on 11 September 2001 just as that “zeitgeist manifested itself”. The daily writing continued, though, producing, among other volumes, In My Mind’s Eye (2018), serialised on BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week, and, earlier this year, Thinking Again.

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Morris relished the adventure: “I was a member of two clubs in London, one as a man and one as a woman, and I would sometimes change my identity in a taxi between the two.” Morris had been denied surgery in the UK because the couple refused to divorce, and wrote in Conundrum (1974), which told most of the story, that the marriage had no right to work, “yet it worked like a dream, living testimony ... of love in its purest sense over everything else”. I put it down to kindness,” she says. “Just that. Everything good in the world is kindness. Though the only person who ever uses that word in politics is the prime minister of New Zealand [Jacinda Ardern]. She is tremendous isn’t she? I’d like to meet her.” A historian, a biographer and an author of fiction, ultimately Morris was a writer of great enthusiasm for whatever she focused on. Drawn by a deep curiosity for the world, she was a writer who happened to fall into travelling — by her own definition she was not a travel writer but someone who ‘wrote many books about place, which are nothing to do with movement’. As former Head of Channel Four Drama, Controller of BBC Drama Production and MD of Company Pictures, John has tested his theories during an extensive production career working on some of the world’s most lucrative, widely viewed and critically acclaimed TV drama. As founder of the hugely successful BBC Writers Academy John has trained a generation of screenwriters - his students have had 17 green-lights in the last two years alone.