Jan Morris

I think when you get a second term, you know that the job's not worth having unless you use authority.

got this wonderful description of you, Jan Morris, the Welsh travel writer.

You know what I'm going to say, don't you? And I think you invited her into Question Time to witness the proceedings of New South Wales Parliament.

You were the premier at the time.

I quote, this is Jan Morris, prominent among the combatants was a man I happen to know and thought of as a civilized and benevolent fellow He was transformed.

He strode around there like a mad prosecutor.

He called his opponents madmen, cheats, scoundrels.

I was opposition leader at the time.

Ben Okri is talking about his work.

We've got the biographer of Jan Morris.

Sarah Wheeler is gonna be talking about her biography.

And we've got a memoir by a charcoal burner, which is an unusual avenue for us to be exploring, but it's a man who lives in Dorset in a van and makes charcoal.

... uh, to reference the book by, uh, Jan-

...

Morris.

So 10 years after Jorgensen.

And then again, Jan Morris, the very famous travel writer, again in Britain.

And that was in the 70s.

He came out as trans.

I've already started in on that, as I said.

Jan Morris was kind of one of those episodes, Colin Thubron, and the one I'm working on right now.

I'll still do episodes on single books from time to time if something really catches my attention or sparks my curiosity, or if it's a book by somebody I know, a new book by somebody I know.

But I'm going to do my best to resist getting pulled into just trying to throw something together every couple of weeks to get a new episode out or whenever I feel guilty that there hasn't been a new episode in a while.

Yeah.

And if it's a multi-book episode, obviously add in the reading time for that.

So, for example, the last multi-book one I did with Jan Morris, I read and reread seven Morris books plus Sarah's bio.

So that's eight books for that one.

And that's on Radio 4 at 9.30 p.m. And The Goon Show is today's vintage comedy with an episode from 1954 on Radio 4 Extra at 7.30 a.m., 12.30 p.m. and 6.30 p.m. And then to Wednesday, the 7th of October, the Times journalist James Morris was covering the 1953 Everest expedition and broke the news that Hillary and Tenzing had reached the summit.

In 1973, he transitioned surgically and became Jan Morris.

Horatio Clare examines Morris's life in Jan Morris Writing a Life on Radio 4 Extra at 10am and 4pm.

Radio 3 in Concert this evening presents the BBC National Orchestra of Wales with a concert on the themes of protest, power, revolution and resistance.

That's on Radio 3 at 7.30pm. Robert Ballard's career in deep sea exploration, including his discovery of the wreck of the Titanic, is the subject of The Life Scientific on Radio 4 at 9pm.

Every single element of the empire seems to have come together by chance, been held together by good fortune or determination, but without any sort of supervisory structure.

There's no sense, once you read this book, that the empire had any straightforward plan that it was trying to put into place and it's kind of remarkable that this enormous and powerful assemblage of nations and nationalities and tradings and wars and all the rest it wasn't being in some way pushed by a single straightforward thought process that there was no sort of through thought that was guiding the whole thing it wasn't it was it it came together by chance and it stayed together almost by chance as well it's an extraordinary tale but for both as a reader as it were to myself as well as being a reader out loud the great thing about Jan Morris' writing is the way that this is brought to life It's not just as though Jan Morris has been to these places.

Quite clearly, she has.

And you get an immense and powerful sense of place from the writing.