oh to travel, isn't that just the thing, everyone's favorite hobby, to get away and have adventures, see life from different angles, take in history and view the panorama of the world all at the same time, you go some wheres and see some things, but unless you are traveling for pure thrill-seekin...
Jan Morris called Britain's handling of the 1997 handover of Hong Kong "sufficiently stylish". I think that's meant to be faint praise.Funnily enough, that's the exact phrase I'd use to describe her book. But my praise isn't faint.Morris has a lot of love for word-play and a lot of love for Hong...
Magic. This is what all travel books ought to be like: insightful, witty, informative. Again and again, Jan Morris manages to spot the tiny detail – the one that you or I probably wouldn’t have noticed - that somehow draws out the essence of a place and that makes you think “ah yes, that’s wha...
This is essential history.Amazon review:I'm in the midst of reading the trilogy, and I must say that, as a history major and history buff, I've never come across a history so well-told and of such consistent quality. And by "quality" I mean not only the quality of the prose itself but the editing...
I didn't like this so much when I read it about 7 or 8 years ago, but my friend Robin Hemley, whose opinions I value, thinks it's really good, so I'm going to have to go back now. I've been to Trieste many times, so maybe I'm comparing her discussions with my own memories and impressions. Maybe I...
”At first sight, I’m sure you will agree, it is nothing much to look at. There are lots of such buildings in our part of Wales--solid old stone-built farm buildings, apparently timeless, built of big rough boulders and roofed with slate from the mountain quarries. Many of them are crumbled now, b...
I love Jan Morris, having been blown away by two quite different projects of hers: the first, her epic 3-volume evocation of the British Empire which summons up the complexity and hugeness of the thing in a series of detailed vignettes; the second, her single-volume meditations on individual citi...
Whether you are a connoisseur of high ice and windy ridges or a sedate epicure of modern English prose, Morris's Coronation Everest will send a chill down your spine. As much a story of mid-century journalism and the rush for the scoop as a record of the first successful conquest of Everest, the ...
If you've made it through the first two books of this series, you already know exactly what to expect. If you choose to start here because you're more interested in the post-Victorian reversal of fortune, then it's safe to say you could jump in and not really be lost. You'd miss out, but you woul...
Near the end of Conundrum, Jan Morris writes about walking through Casablanca on the eve of her sex change operation as feeling like she was about to pay “a visit to a wizard,” like she was “a figure of fairy tale, about to be transformed” (119). And, as in some fairy tales, what she is to be tra...
We don’t want to fight, but by jingo if we do,We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too! INNOCENTS ABROAD!This is history told through a patchwork of breezy anecdotes — that might not even fit together well enough, but still achieves the objective remarkably well. The narra...
Patrick Leigh Fermor relied on a Rhine barge, the odd lorry lift and his own two legs to carry him through Holland, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Northern Hungary. Now, he’s crossing the Great Hungarian Plain on horseback: Whenever he got the chance, Malek broke into a canter, and one of ...