Jan Morris: A Life
A compassionate and comprehensive biography ... Ms. Wheeler, herself a travel writer, knew and admired Morris, but she pins the biographical butterfly firmly in place.
Moving ... Wheeler’s biography is vivid, comprehensive, a bit fluky and very British ... The tone can be glib ('King Farouk, still an ass …'). Her garrulous interjections don’t always land. Yet being a bit fluky is better than being dull, which this biography is not ... Captures Morris’s multiple and overlapping contradictions ... Wheeler never quite gets to the bottom of Morris’s sex life, a topic Morris mostly avoided in print ... I wish this biography suggested more of the hassles and anxieties that routinely accompany travel.
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Like a skilful family therapist, Wheeler makes space for all this complication, mostly without judgment, though judgments of one’s own are hard to resist ... This is a sensitive, beautifully written, and masterly biography; a huge portrait whose perspective occasionally leaves Morris looking rather small.
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