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“... York, bathed in the rosy, gauzy haze of a dawn sun. The serenity of it all is deceptive, because Jan Morris is screaming in on a special assignment from Rolling Stone. Her collection of essays touches down in a quick succession of trouble-torn areas – India in the Emergency, post-Watergate Washington, Southern Africa, Panama, even London with its ...”

“... could peddle opium to China (in an interesting chapter on the early days of British rule, Jan Morris observes that the first great seal of the colony depicted beneath the royal crest a waterfront piled high with what were generally assumed to be opium chests). Even today, a large proportion of Hong Kong people sincerely (though quite ...”

“... to Eothen. ‘Kinglake’s effect upon the art of travel-writing has been profound,’ writes Jan Morris, for the Oxford edition. ‘His influence may be traced down the generations from Robert Curzon’s Monasteries of the Levant (1849) to Robert Byron’s Road to Oxiana (1937) or Paul Theroux’s Great Railway Bazaar (1975).’ For the Century ...”

“... coming closer to the English condition. It is possible to strike out on a quite different path, as Jan Morris has done in The Matter of Wales. The book is engagingly inward with Welsh landscape and history, though whenever it came very close (as in my case on the Black Mountains) I heard a different, informed and sympathetic but observing, voice. In its ...”

“... into his abundant memories of Sir Gerald du Maurier playing Bulldog Drummond. One wonders how Jan Morris, who so skilfully assembled the imperial nostalgias, came to miss the detective ...”

“... For the British Empire was itself in many ways a grand pastiche: a de luxe effort of style. As Jan Morris and, more recently, David Cannadine have argued, the British elicited respect from their subjects abroad by spectacle as well as by force, exporting to their various dominions a home-grown instinct for pomp and ceremony, inflected with local ...”

“... going bald. Transgender, or trans, takes in the narrower categories of transsexuals (like Jan Morris), cross-dressers (like Eddie Izzard, and me), third-gender or genderqueer folks, and people who aren’t sure where they belong, but know that they want to be, or present themselves as, a gender that doesn’t match the body with which they were ...”

“... in English, Latin and history. For history, we were given Heaven’s Command, the first volume of Jan Morris’s trilogy about the rise and fall of the British Empire, along with extracts from the other two volumes. The trilogy is a lush, romantic account of the enormous, bloody, dust-filled adventure of empire. ...”

“... South Coast matinée rather than wrangle with literati over the competing merits of Iris Murdoch, Jan Morris and Keri Hulme.This year the judges did make one interesting – and perhaps influential – early decision. Publishers have hitherto been allowed to nominate four books for the prize, but also submit a ‘B’ list which the judges can call in if ...”

“... to say, ‘transcending’, as in ‘above’, or ‘in a different realm from’, both. Thus Jan Morris in Conundrum in 1974: ‘There is neither man nor woman … I shall transcend both.’ Even that is not all. If transsexuality is subsumed in the broader category of transgender, as it is for example in the Transgender Studies readers, then there ...”

“... Why Florence? What made this particular European city so important for the arts in the Renaissance? It’s a problem many historians have tried to solve. The latest is Professor Goldthwaite, an old Florentine hand who has moved from a study of the ways in which the Florentines made their money to a study of the ways in which they spent it. ‘Never show off your wealth,’ the Florentine citizen Giovanni Morelli anxiously advised his sons early in the 15th century, ‘but keep it hidden, and always by words and acts make people believe that you possess one half as much as you have ...”

“... seen if you think of the new abridgment of Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice, docked and decked by Jan Morris; and of her Venice of 1960, which manages, in innumerable ways that are apt to McEwan’s taut enterprise, to soften fierce eroticism into the cosily comfortable (‘Venice remains a sexy city still, as many a ravished alien has discovered. It is ...”

“... Feisal died in Berne, where he had sought medical treatment, a few months later. Bakr Sidqi, whom Jan Morris called ‘a Kurdish Goering’, was himself murdered in Mosul in 1937. Mosul’s reputation for violence, however, was at an early stage. Its most awful hour came in March 1959, a year after the revolution that deposed Feisal’s ...”

“... lines of predilection. Sappho gets in, but not Patience Strong; ‘John’ Radclyffe Hall, but not Jan Morris; Julia Kristeva, but not Elizabeth David (nor Jane Grigson, nor even Mrs Beeton – writing about cooking does not rate high). Betty Friedan gets in, but not Mary Douglas; Hannah Arendt, but not Barbara Wootton. In general, journalists get a raw ...”

“... been squeezed out by the rise of mechanised processes and of merely economic calculation. William Morris’s Kelmscott Press represented this new impulse most forcefully. Its immediate legacy was the diversion (not at all wished for by Morris) of private press printing: unwanted texts, preciously dressed for the ...”