... highly engaging ... Reading these beautifully written pages, one is struck by the gentle note of lament they host for two countries — or civilizations, perhaps — whose fate Morris has observed at close quarters ... Morris is particularly interesting on the United States ... Morris expresses that sentiment quite strikingly in these entries. Hers are grave, measured thoughts, well worth dwelling upon today ... In My Mind’s Eye is a lovely book, halfway between a diary and a volume of brief essays, a book that has a gentle, haunting tone.
... In My Mind’s Eye offers strong opinions, wryly delivered ... For readers who have been involved in an ongoing conversation with Morris over the past five decades, these little gems will amuse and occasionally enlighten ... The beauty of Morris’ work is how she takes the reader along in a dialogue. Her style is chatty, loose and engaging.
This is vintage Morris—the mundane mingling with the majestic in a casual embrace ... Although her landscape is smaller these days, sometimes confined to her own walls, Ms. Morris finds plenty of inspiration in what she sees ... In My Mind’s Eye isn’t Ms. Morris’s best work ... And yet there are sublime moments, as when she compares the challenges of age to the exile of the Roman poet Ovid.
The most purely charming thing I have read so far in 2019 is Jan Morris’s In My Mind’s Eye ... Morris’s voice combines thoughtfulness and kindliness in equal measure, and it is a profound pleasure to just spend time with her as she works out her thoughts ... There is so much dash and verve in Morris’s sentences, so much personality, a generosity of spirit that is flavored by well-earned crankiness ... Morris’s In My Mind’s Eye is so charming, so endearing, such an antidote to boredom, that I find myself tempted to give it the Montaigne treatment.
Her pieces include colourful stories ... Morris aficionados will not find much new material here since some stories are reheated from earlier work ... Her cheerfulness and passion are still to the fore... but the energy and inventiveness that characterises Morris’s writing capturing the genius loci is missing. There is an absence of any insight into the present world turmoil or of a light being shone on turbulent times.
... [Morris' writing style is] both effervescent and substantial ... for this consummate observer and chronicler, brevity belies depth. At one point, Morris refers to both the 'gentle beauty of England’s countryside' and the 'grandness of its history.' One can describe Morris’ prose the same way.
Today, Morris’s horizons are limited to what she remembers and what she sees at home in north-west Wales. But it is its limitations that makes this book valuable and rare. It reveals so much about how to soldier on in your 90s ... She writes with blustery friendliness – the prose low-wattage ... If there is some retreading of turf, this fits the book’s diurnal structure...
... these brief, daily entries range so widely, from sharp, wistful or cranky to eccentric and grandmotherly. Of course, as with most undertakings of this sort, the entries are highly variable and their qualities uneven ... At her best, Morris is perceptive and astute, her tenor improvisational ... But she also can be naive and a bit gloomy.
