Bonjour Trieste

On looking down from the cathedral tower of San Giusto, high above the Adriatic seaport of Trieste, Jan Morris reflects upon her lifetime's experience of Europe. Her first acquaintance with Trieste came in the summer of 1946 while she - then he - was stationed with the British Army en route to Palestine, and renewed almost yearly during her time in journalism and as a writer.

This ancient city, once the great port of entry to the Habsburg Empire, had escaped the worst ravages of the war, and invoked a sense of nostalgia in Morris for all the famous European capitals which lay in ruin. It was also at the fulcrum of the continent, "where Slavs, Teutons and Latin met, or turned their back on one another". Ever since, Trieste has been associated with her conception of Europe, and so she returns and uses the city in her new book as a point of reference for her impressions.

Assuming the differing guises of chronology, travel book, history and work of reference, Fifty Years of Europe is a highly personal and subjective account of the European continent, recorded in vignettes, portraits, quotations and contemplation. This exploration of Europe's culture, landscape, people and beliefs is interwoven with brief sketches relating directly to Trieste and its varied make-up. For as Morris points out, it seems the perfect working microcosm. "This city is hemmed in by artificial frontiers, inhabited by people of several races, complicated by the detritus of abandoned empires and by the effects of unnecessary wars."

But this collection of her reflections concerns all of Europe during the second half of the 20th century, ranging from evocations of megalithic religion to sensations of barge travel on the Rhine; from the gloom of Warsaw during the Cold War to the weird euphoria of Albania in the 1990s. Over the expanse of 50 complex years, Morris is heartened to see Europe return to glory, if not grace, as the nations of the continent "grope their way towards comity".

Anglo-Welsh by birth, Welsh by loyalty, Jan Morris succeeds in linking this fateful transitional period for Europe with her own progression from British imperial pride through Welsh nationalism to what she calls Euro-Welshness; a nationhood in a united Europe, as set out in her essay, "The Princeship of Wales", one in a series of polemical pamphlets published last year in the Changing Wales series from Gomer Press.

Her most arduous journey, however, has involved crossing a quite different boundary. When her autobiography, Conundrum, was first published in 1974 the world learned of James Morris's transsexualism, the years of torment, and the surgeon's clinic in Casablanca which brought out the true gender of Jan Morris. Although she has voiced concerns about critics bringing up what she terms the "Conundrum Factor" when reviewing her latest book on Wales or Anglo-Indian architecture (or in this case Europe), she resigns herself to the public's fascination: "Half a lifetime of diligent craftsmanship had done far less for my reputation than a simple change of sex."

In Fifty Years of Europe the continent is defined by art not politics - the Dublin of Joyce, the Prague of Kafka, the Norway of Ibsen, the Austria of Mozart, the France of Proust - all citizens of what Voltaire called "a kind of great republic".

And although it is nostalgic in parts, there is no Panglossian optimism in Morris's book, only a hope that a modern European Enlightenment will see the smaller nations fulfil their promise in a unified continent: "The nostalgia that I felt here 50 years ago was, I realise now, nostalgia not for a lost Europe, but for a Europe that never was, and has yet to be."

Dara Gantly is a student journalist