Travel writing, as a genre, changed a lot during her career. She started writing in a time of declining empire, when fantasies about faraway places—colonial life and colonial subjects—were integral to British identity. Her early readers weren’t likely to have traveled much at all, but by her last book, it was the age of Ryanair, and the world order had shifted. I am curious if you have thoughts on the evolving mandates of the genre.

Morris had a similar feeling—that anyone can go anywhere now. In the eighties, she said, “Goodness, you can buy a ticket to Kathmandu from Cedar Falls, Iowa.” But really, travel writers have been saying that since the Odyssey. It’s true we’re not pioneers who aren’t sure what’s on the end of the map anymore. We’ve got Google Maps to tell us what’s everywhere, but the fact is, we’re still confronting the other—different situations, different people, different worldviews. I feel that it’s more valid than ever to listen to what the other is saying, although God knows, nobody seems to be.

Was this political for her?

Morris wasn’t really an apologist for empire, but she made no bones about the fact that she loved its style. She loved the glitter of horses on parade, and the trill of a bugle, and all the rest of it. She began her career saying, This is the side of it I like, and it is incredibly interesting, and there’s lots of really interesting characters here, and I’m going to tell you about that, and then I’m going to describe all these places, and so on.

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For a while, she was a card-carrying Welsh nationalist, very keen on the idea of Wales seceding from the UK. She really banged that drum—wrote a lot of newspaper pieces about the terrible English tourists racing all over Wales and destroying everything. In the nineties and two thousands, she spent a lot of time in the Balkans—Bosnia and Herzegovina in particular—and that was when she looked around and said, I see what they’re doing to one another, and I wonder if that could be happening in Wales.

After that, she went off the boil with nationalism. She saw the perils and began to go beyond it.