During her career as a journalist at the Times and a teenage intelligence officer in the final years of the second World War Morris met Che Guevara, Kim Philby and Dwight D Eisenhower. This was nothing more than a handshake and an acknowledgement of our shared Britishness in New York. She reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem and climbed Everest with Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. At the same time as these professional and literary achievements, however, Jan was also undergoing a deep crisis of personal identity.

S. Directed by Gabe Polsky, the film stars Nicolas Cage as the frontiersman Miller and Fred Hechinger. In 1982, Morris saw more clearly than Mrs Margaret Thatcher the sterility of the Falklands War, her imperial claim to islands 8,000 miles away from mainland Britain. Still other passages could have been written today: wondering whether and how to come out with young children in the house, she registers “the fear that I might in some way harm them by revealing the truth too soon. In 1972, Morris travelled to Morocco to undergo sex reassignment surgery, performed by surgeon Georges Burou, [1] :135–144 because doctors in Britain refused to allow the procedure unless Morris and Tuckniss divorced, something Morris was not prepared to do. Not only can I imagine more vividly how other people feel: released at last from those old bridles and blinkers, I am beginning to know how I feel myself.This wish, James’s own fervent wish, became increasingly hard to bear, and in the end he had to do something about it.

The message was initially interpreted to mean that Tom Bourdillon and Tenzing had reached the summit, but the first name was corrected before the story was broken. Four children later, Morris was delighted with her loving family, and yet she continued to be tortured by her sense that her role was the wrong one.

Morris, at 26, was the only journalist to accompany Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay on their 1953 ascent of Everest. Between the lead-up to surgery, the wrong-body story, and the occasional nostalgia for Empire, Morris’s memoir might now seem so dated as to provide no help for the present—except that it does, and not just for its rich style. He was anyway an outrageously successful journalist, moving with his family to live in the French Alps, flush with flash magazine commissions (a single piece – not one for the Guardian – paid for a car) and contracts for more books, including Sultan in Oman (1957) and The Hashemite Kings (1959). She “cherished that knowledge as a secret” through the male sociability of a boarding school, the Army’s postwar Ninth Lancers, the Everest expedition, and the professional life of a midcentury foreign correspondent, rushing from coup to summit to tourist attraction to war zone.