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She has been many things. A soldier, a journalist, a travel writer, an historian; and, of course, both a woman and a man. James Humphrey Morris was born in 1926, and studied at Sandhurst and Oxford. In 1953 he secured one of the century’s great scoops — for The Times, as it happens — with his report of the conquest of Everest. The work for which she may be best remembered, Pax Britannica, is a magisterial and highly readable three-volume history of the British Empire; while writing it, she completed a sex change in 1972. Her other books, on Hong Kong, on Venice, on Oxford, blend history and travel in a manner that forged a path for many other writers. Rebecca West called her “perhaps the best descriptive writer of our time”. Her novel Last Letters from Hav was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1985.

One to read: Pax Britannica: The Climax of Empire (1968)

More about Jan Morris

Read James Morris' Times report on the conquest of Everest, June 2, 1953

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