Jan Morris

Through an exploration of her country home in Wales, acclaimed travel writer Jan Morris discovers the heart of her fascinating country and what it means to be Welsh. Trefan Morys, Morris's home between the sea and mountains of the remote northwest corner of Wales, is the 18th-century stable block of her former family house nearby. Surrounding it are the fields and outbuildings, the mud, sheep, and cattle of a working Welsh farm.

She regards

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This beloved account about an intrepid young Englishman on the first leg of his walk from London to Constantinople is simply one of the best works of travel literature ever written. 
At the age of eighteen, Patrick Leigh Fermor set off from the heart of London on an epic journey—to walk to Constantinople. A Time of Gifts is the rich account of his adventures as far as Hungary, after which Between the Woods and the Water...

"Ciao, Carpaccio! Veteran travel writer Jan Morris hails the Venetian Renaissance painter Vittore Carpaccio in this charming homage to his work. In the course of writing her classic book on Venice, Morris became utterly enchanted with the historical presence of this sometimes-overlooked artist. Now she indulges her infatuation with this handsomely designed and imminently entertaining exploration that ranges from biography to art interpretation to...

"An extraordinary--and strikingly illustrated--reflection on the meaning of war from one of our greatest living writers. The battleship Yamato, of the Imperial Japanese Navy, was the most powerful warship of World War II and represented the climax, as it were, of the Japanese warrior traditions of the samurai--the ideals of honor, discipline, and self-sacrifice that had immemorially ennobled the Japanese national consciousness. Stoically poised for...

"Jan Morris (1926-2020), the world-renowned writer, delivers her final volume, brimming with vibrant reminiscenses, meditations on daily life, and mini-essays on everything from maturity to whistling to Princess Diana. Not so long ago, feeling intimations of mortality, Jan Morris embarked on a wholly novel literary enterprise. What began as a series of high-minded letters to her late daughter-in the style of Lord Chesterfield addressing his son-quickly...

Jan Morris is one of the great British writers of the post-war era. Soldier, journalist, writer about places (rather than 'travel writer'), elegist of the British Empire, novelist, she has fashioned a distinctive prose style that is elegant, fastidious, supple, and sometimes gloriously gaudy. For many readers she is best known for her candid memoir Conundrum, which described the gender reassignment operation she underwent in 1972.But as Ariel demonstrates,...

Continuing the epic foot journey across Europe begun in A Time of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor writes about walking from Hungary to the Balkans. 
The journey that Patrick Leigh Fermor set out on in 1933—to cross Europe on foot with an emergency allowance of one pound a day—proved so rich in experiences that when much later he sat down to describe them, they overflowed into more than one volume. Undertaken as the...