Pinc List 2017". Wales Online. 19 August 2017. Archived from the original on 20 August 2017 . Retrieved 20 August 2017. It's so....listy. Lists of boats, lists of lions, lists of towers, lists of burial places. The lists go on and on. The description is so exhaustive as to be exhausting. In a word: tedious. Morris naturalised as Welsh through elective affinity with her father’s land. She did formally divorce Elizabeth, and after their children had grown and left the family home, Plas Trefan, in Llanystumdwy, they moved to live together for decades as “sisters-in-law” in its converted stables, Trefan Morys. At their home’s heart was a great kitchen where the postman left the mail on the table long after the habit was abandoned elsewhere. (After other customs and laws had also evolved, the couple registered a civil partnership at Pwllheli council office in 2008.)

Never, no. The sea is just over there. I wouldn’t want to be entirely in the mountains. I go down to the sea most days. I suppose the day will come when I cannot drive the Honda. Then I suppose I will have to walk it.”

Is Jan Morris's book responsible for perpetuating a certain idea of Venice through the later 20th century? Venice as elegant, decaying, exotic, a mélange and meeting-point of East and West... Perhaps in Britain at least. In this book, I felt like I'd found a key to where it comes from. When I was younger, I managed to do an entire course on the city without being aware of these ideas: this legend is something that lives in the realms of literature and pop high-culture, not academic texts. In arts it seems overwhelming once you've noticed it, almost the only way Venice is talked about, a given in general-audience writing and TV documentaries. Other Venetian waterways ... have an average width of twelve feet, and the average depth of a fair-sized family bath-tub." (The City: 12) John Yorke delves into how Jan Morris defied boundaries in Venice and explores why Morris’ first impressions of the city in 1945 were so powerful to her. He also listens to other readers of Venice who talk about Morris’ vivid description and playful wit. And Jan Morris herself refers to the city of Venice as a touchstone in Conundrum, her account of her gender reassignment in the 1970s.

I felt – wonderfully – like I was walking around in Winterson’s novel. Ironically enough, since Winterson says: “I hadn’t been to Venice when I wrote about it,” adding, piquantly, “which is perfect because Venice doesn’t really exist.” I get her to remind me of the bones of it just to hear her tell it. When she was assigned by the Times, which sponsored the ascent, she had never climbed any mountain before. They had to work out a way of protecting their scoop and get it into the paper in time for the Queen’s coronation. Having hugged Hillary in congratulation, Morris scrambled down an ice field and sent a wire overnight with a pre-coded message. It read: “Snow conditions bad stop advanced base abandoned yesterday stop awaiting improvement.” This meant: “Summit of Everest reached on 29 May by Hillary and Tenzing.” Morris made a lot of friendships on the mountain and they all stayed in touch for the rest of their lives. She is now the last survivor from that last camp. 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. Jan Morris first arrived here in 1945, as an 18-year-old intelligence officer with the British Army. Then she was James Morris: a man to the world, a woman to herself. ( Editor’s note: Morris wouldn’t transition for another three decades, but we are using her preferred pronouns throughout.) Venice was in those days like “a surrendered knight at arms”—a wistful, melancholic place where the glories of the old republic, the so-called Serenissima, had been ceded to a decidedly humbler present.Famously mischievous and waspish in words, Morris was also kind, highlighting the human qualities of a place while managing simultaneously to serve up a scholar’s knowledge in digestible doses. As one of her later books, In My Mind’s Eye (2018) illustrated, she had a great love of animalsand a deep revulsion of human cruelty. She made it a habit of attending court proceedings wherever she travelled, to better understand the destination but also to deliver the accused ‘a smile of sympathy’. If Morris’s gleefully subjective mode of reportage seems commonplace today, it wasn’t always so. As historian Peter Stead put it in a BBC profile about Morris, the genre was once divided into two rather tedious camps, at least in Britain: the scholars on the one hand and the complainers on the other. The scholars wrote for a highly educated audience that understood oblique references to art and history. The complainers, conversely, used their forays away from home to point out the failings of others: Those Italian waiters—really!

Shopland, Norena 'A tangle in my life' from Forbidden Lives: LGBT stories from Wales, Seren Books, 2017 Venables, Stephen (2003). To the top: the story of Everest. London: Walker Books. p.63. ISBN 0-7445-8662-3. Pax opens at the imperial zenith of Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee; Heaven’s Command, a prequel about the empire’s creation, understands the grand illusions in the projection of power, both of masculinity and imperialism. Morris’s knowledge of altered states, plus her memories of post-1948 nights when so many new presidents of former colonies, lately released from detention, danced with Princess Margaret after the union flag was hauled down, enriched Farewell the Trumpets. Lively, Penelope (23 February 2014). "A Writer's House in Wales". The Independent . Retrieved 22 November 2020.And then, she really takes flight. Consider the following note on the stone horses that used to rear out of the Basilica that: “I often saw them paw the stonework, at starlit Venetian midnights, and once I heard a whinny from the second horse on the right, so old, brave and metallic that St Theodore’s crocodile, raising its head from beneath the saintly buskins, answered with a kind of grunt.” As Morris herself says in her 1993 foreword, the book is: “a highly subjective, romantic, impressionist picture less of a city than of an experience.” Adams, Tim (1 March 2020). "You're talking to someone at the very end of things". The Guardian . Retrieved 22 November 2020. The operation was a success. Morris returned to England and divorced her wife Elizabeth, as was required by law, though the two would remain partners for life. (In 2011 they entered a civil union.) Morris was a chorister in the choir of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, while boarding at Christ Church Cathedral School. [13] She went on to be educated at Lancing College, returning to Christ Church, Oxford, as an undergraduate, taking a second-class honours BA in 1951 (promoted to the customary Oxford MA in 1961), and editing the Cherwell magazine. [10] [14] Despite being born and largely raised in England, Morris always identified as Welsh. [15] In the closing stages of the Second World War, Morris served in the 9th Queen's Royal Lancers, and in 1945 was posted to the Free Territory of Trieste, during the joint British–American occupation, eventually serving as regimental intelligence officer. [5] [16] Career [ edit ] Can you tell us anything about the book I believe you’ve written which will be published posthumously?