Jan Morris’s dazzling Venice topped bestseller lists around the world when it burst onto a staid literary scene in 1960 and to this day is one of the best-loved accounts of the city. But in this scintillating talk, based on material never previously made public, Morris’s official biographer Sara Wheeler reveals that the relationship between the celebrated travel  writer and Venice extended far beyond that one volume. Morris had pulled into a desolate Serenissima on a troop train in 1946, a gauche, nineteen-year-old Cavalry lieutenant who had to be pushed into a smoky Harry’s Bar (it had swing doors then). Seven decades later, on the last of a myriad glorious trips, the patron of Harry’s crowned his doughty customer as one of the Immortals. Venice had changed, of course. But so had Morris.

For the first time, Wheeler, herself a pioneering travel writer, shines a light specifically on Morris and the city that enthralled her. Some of her new material is surprising – even shocking: but it reveals that Venice was never far from Morris’s imagination. Everything, she said, flowed from ‘the dream of it’.