Claims that the news was held back ignore the communication problems of the time; it was quite an achievement to get the news of the 29 May ascent to London by Coronation Day on 2 June, as it had to be sent to Namche Bazaar by runner.

The tapping of the bird leads Morris into the first of a few apologies that she no longer has the eloquence she once did as an interviewee.In it he notes at one point how “it is interesting to consider that the move from male to female and the move from Englishness to Welshness were roughly concurrent”. I think I was probably the last journalist to ask a version of what became known as the “Jan Morris Memorial Question”, when I interviewed her a few months before she died.

I find myself whistling that many mornings these days,” Morris says, “but then I always get up, of course. When he met and fell in love with Elizabeth Tuckniss, Morris knew she had to tell her the truth about her identity.Part of that deflection has centred on her lifelong crush on the most unattainable of pin-ups: Admiral Jack Fisher, charismatic First Sea Lord of the British fleet in the Great War, a man who died six years before Morris was born. Michael Palin talks about the Jan Morris he met - witty, generous and inspirational, but also a challenging interviewee who used a variety of techniques to deflect difficult questions about her private life. In 2005, she was awarded the Golden PEN Award by English PEN for "a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature". Morris was a member of the 1953 British Mount Everest expedition, which made the first ever confirmed ascent of the mountain. In her dreamy books about cities – most memorably Venice and Trieste – the world can seem a permanent Xanadu.

If I was assumed to be oddly incompetent at reversing cars, or opening bottles, oddly incompetent I found myself becoming…Men treated me more and more as a junior…and so, addressed every day of my life as an inferior, involuntarily, I accepted the condition. It is a passionate, lifelong, ineradicable conviction, and no true transsexual has ever been disabused of it…I equate it with the idea of soul, or self, and I think of it not just as a sexual enigma, but as a quest for unity. Written with all Morris’s characteristic brio it is a compulsive exploration of patriotism, of manly endeavour, which ends in elegiac retreat and submission.But I was immediately struck by Jan’s warmth and affability, qualities that are key to her genius for talking to people and drawing stories from them. In Conundrum she wondered whether her “incessant wandering” as a journalist for the Times and the Guardian and freelance “had been an outward expression of my inner journey”. Morris went on to receive praise for her immersive travel writing, with Venice and Trieste among the favored locations, and for her “Pax Britannica” histories about the British empire, a trilogy begun as James Morris and concluded as Jan Morris. This book is a very well-written account of some of the emotional factors which eventually led the author, by then in his forties, to submit to expensive surgery in Casablanca. Insisting that she’s one of the real, deserving few, and not of the mentally ill, unreliable many, Morris replicates the medical model propounded in the sixties and seventies by doctors such as Harry Benjamin and Robert Stoller.