“I think it could be claimed,” Morris wrote in a late unpublished fragment, “that during the second half of the twentieth century I wrote about more places than anyone else, and I was in a position to witness, and to reflect in my writing, many of the great historical events of the time. As I experienced all this first as a man, then as a woman, it might also be said (although I wouldn’t want to make much of this) that my viewpoint was unique.”

The contradictions and anomalies that kept on coming only made her life more alluring. She preached the virtues of kindness, but after she died her daughter revealed unspeakable parental cruelty; she was a famous chronicler of the British Empire (some say an apologist for it) and a card-carrying Welsh nationalist. She was singular and contrary, yet I began to discern — and this surprised me — that her life reveals much that is universal. About addiction, for example: Morris was addicted to writing — to the creative process as a means of filling the void, or at least of trying to block it out. Was it through universality that she achieved the twin grail of sales and critical acclaim? This needed to be explored — so many have tried for that grail and failed. Few would put Morris in the very top rank as a writer (including me), but that is a high bar, and as a person she seemed to me more interesting than any man or woman who has ever made it into that minuscule band.

The politics of transition have risen high on the public agenda since [I met Morris] in Wales a quarter of a century ago, and so, more predictably, have arguments over Empire. Morris’s 1,600-page Pax Britannica trilogy charts the rise and decline of what she called an “ambiguous epic.” She wrote it in the transition years and called it “the centrepiece of my life,” conceived as “the recollections of a centurion in the dying days of the Roman Empire, telling us how the Empire worked in his province.” The role of the observant centurion was one she played for many decades all around the mutable world.

Taken together, the material revealed everything and nothing. What of the place where the documents stop? How to extract the essence of a person from the clutter of days and years? Sometimes I lost Morris in the dark. The depth of her ambition was hard to reach, as was her self-absorption. As I plowed on, I wondered if the life was going to overshadow the work. She found irony in everything (she said), and there was irony in the gap between her words and her actions. It is hard for anyone wishing to honour Jan Morris’s reputation to acknowledge family revelations.

The biographer’s task is to breathe life into an inert mass of material, then discard most of it. She must at all costs (I believe) avoid the impulse to impose coherence. In other words, the life-writer cannot take a doggedly factual approach that ignores a whole layer of emotional and imaginative experience. All of us who do this so-called job seek to uncover an inner life. But whom do we really know? Motives are like deep-sea fish — even our own. Morris curated her image through more than 50 books, as well as many hundreds of essays and quite a few Panorama films. The image was the mask. She acknowledged it sometimes. In her eighties she made a film reviewing her life for her U.S. publisher. When the interview finished, she said, off-camera, “I’ve never heard such a lot of balls propounded.” I heard her saying it on the tape.

At least we had some things in common. I took my first steps on Clevedon Pier, like her, and like her my earliest memories are of ships gliding up the Bristol Channel, headed, who knew, to Xanadu. I too have earned my living on the road for many decades. I know the loneliness of the empty hotel room and its bleak single bed, as well as the bleaker letter from HMRC [His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs]. I too could remember, sitting on a warm rock on some foreign shore, twiddling the dial for what Morris called “the grave sound of Big Ben on the BBC World Service, and the resonant, almost ecclesiastical way in which the announcer declaimed, ‘This is London.’”

She drove me mad at times. Often when I read her tricksily asking me, the reader, “Come with me now …” as she loved to do on the page, I had only one answer: no thanks. But when the chips were down, I found I agreed with her on most things. The right issues made her despair. She once began a review of a Ryszard Kapuściński volume: “This is a book of essays and reminiscences about the Third World and it is enough to make a dead dog cry.”

The biographer’s task is to breathe life into an inert mass of material, then discard most of it. She must at all costs (I believe) avoid the impulse to impose coherence.

When I slept in her bed, before switching off the torch I sometimes read the passages from her last book, Allegorizings, in which she wrote about her dreams. I thought I could actually enter into her unconscious life as well as her physical one by dreaming versions of her dreams. But at her house I dreamed of the Antarctic, where she had never been and I had. It was the only place she couldn’t take away from me.

In 1946, then a 19-year-old cavalry officer, Morris sat on a bollard on a wharf in Trieste to write an essay about nostalgia. A steamboat eructating smoke left for Istria, ferrying indigent refugees home to bombed-out villages. Morris felt a sense of belonging in the city that did not belong, and on the wharf that morning laid the foundations of a whole career exploring nostalgia and its yearnings. Along the way, she would become a public figure as authors seldom do: She had star quality, someone said after she appeared on television tossing her white hair. Besides being read everywhere, she was famous everywhere. When she returned to Darjeeling in middle age, she found a framed poem on the drawing room wall in the Windamere Hotel. She had written it in the visitors’ book four decades earlier.

This is a story about longing, travelling, and never reaching home.