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Jan Morris was an historian and travel writer, described as ‘the Flaubert of the jet age’. Born James Morris, she underwent gender affirmation surgery in 1972. Her frank and moving account of discovering and pursuing her true identity as a woman was diarised in her book, Conundrum (1972), perhaps one of the most influential books of its kind. As a journalist, Morris was the first to report the conquest of Mount Everest in 1953. Her atmospheric portraits of cities, including Venice, Oxford and New York, are widely celebrated, as is Pax Britannia, her three-volume social history of the British Empire.