Daisy Dunn

Beautiful and illuminating: Radio 4’s the Venice Conundrum reviewed          

Plus: the Birmingham suburb where British surrealism was born

Pre-transition, Morris’s biggest fear was that the hormones might affect his talents as a writer. Credit: Photo by Colin McPherson/Corbis via Getty Images
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  • The Venice Conundrum; The Balsall Heath Bohemians

    BBC Radio 4

  • Where Are You Going?

    Apple Podcasts, Spotify and various platforms

The playwright Carlo Gozzi marvelled at ‘The spectacle of women turned into men, men turned into women, and both men and women turned into monkeys’ in 18th-century Venice, and Jan Morris, visiting in the 1950s, did likewise. It would be more than a decade before Morris went under the knife, but already he was contemplating a transition more permanent than any he observed at carnival time.

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