She managed to annoy the sultan by referring to the remnants of slavery. At this remove, her book on Oman somehow sounds more engaging than some of her later effusive offerings on bustling cities and countries. Both outlets allowed her to travel to distant parts of the retreating British Empire. One of them played the flute at Elizabeth II’s coronation – the event neatly heralded by the conquest of Everest, which Morris announced to the world in a coded message dispatched down the mountain via a Sherpa.īy then she was prospering in journalism, initially at the Times, and subsequently, when not allowed to combine reporting with writing books, at the Guardian, when a major scoop about western collusion over Suez helped change the course of British history – or so Clements ambitiously claims. We learn more than before about Morris’s modest if comfortable upbringing, with Welshness on the paternal side education at Lancing and Christ Church, Oxford a character-building spell at Sandhurst and about her talented, musical brothers. He has worked his personal knowledge and existing sources well. In the meantime, Clements deserves plaudits. That extra layer of insight into a fascinating but elusive personality must doubtless await the authorised life by Sara Wheeler. It lacks access to the private papers of its subject and her wife Elizabeth. (I follow Paul Clements in using the feminine pronoun throughout.) It is lively and well written, but it’s not the finished product. Jan Morris: Life from Both Sides A BiographyĪlmost two years after the death of Jan Morris, the jaunty travel writer and pioneer of modern gender transition, her first post-humous biography has arrived.

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