Book description
Jan Morris (then James) first visited Trieste as a soldier at the
end of the Second World War. Since then, the city has come to
represent her own life, with all its hopes, disillusionments, loves
and memories. Here, her thoughts on a host of subjects - ships,
cities, cats, sex, nationalism, Jewishness, civility and kindness -
are inspired by the presence of Trieste, and recorded in or between
the lines of this book. Evoking the whole of its modern history, from
its explosive growth to wealth and fame under the Habsburgs, through
the years of Fascist rule to the miserable years of the Cold War, when
rivalries among the great powers prevented its creation as a free city
under United Nations auspices, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere is
neither a history nor a travel book; like the place, it is one of a kind.
Jan Morris was born in 1926 of a Welsh father and an English mother,
and when she is not travelling she lives with her partner Elizabeth
Morris in the top left-hand corner of Wales, between the mountains and
the sea. Her books include Coronation Everest, Venice, The Pax
Britannica Trilogy (Heaven's Command, Pax Britannica, and Farewell the
Trumpets), and Conundrum. She is also the author of six books about
cities and countries, two autobiographical books, several volumes of
collected travel essays and the unclassifiable Trieste and the Meaning
of Nowhere. A Writer's World, a collection of her travel writing and
reportage from over five decades, was published in 2003. Hav, her novel,
was published in a new and expanded form in 2006.
