Red

A Natural History of the Redhead

Jacky Colliss Harvey (Allen and Unwin, 240pp, £16.99, Oldie price £14.99)

RED HAIR occurs in around 2 per cent of the population, rising as high as 13 per cent in northern countries such as Ireland, Iceland and Scotland, where pale skin helps with the absorption of vitamin D. Those who have red hair are more likely to be stung by bees; they feel pain more severely and require 20 per cent more anaesthetic to be knocked out; they feel the cold more but can also tolerate spicier foods; their bodies produce more adrenaline than non-redheads and can access it quicker.

Jacky Colliss Harvey peppers her new study of red-headedness through history with such morsels of information. And she is as comfortable with science as she is with cultural history. In the ancient world the Thracians were known for their warrior nature and red hair; yet the Greeks also imported them as slaves, and in the plays of Aristophanes, where actors playing Thracians wore red wigs and were caricatured as comically lazy and inept, we see the genesis of the red-headed comic buffoon.

Anti-semitism in medieval Europe was often manifested in antipathy towards red-heads. An art historian by background, Colliss Harvey is especially informative on red hair in painting, from erotic Renaissance depictions of Mary Magdalene to the use of red hair in the late 19th century as a signifier for all kinds of passion and desire. One of her driving themes is that red-headedness represents a classic ‘otherness’ in European history, inciting the kind of discrimination — witness the recent ‘Kick a Ginger Day’ at a school in Rotherham — that would be unacceptable if it were a matter of religion or skin colour. All reviewers found something to enjoy in the book. Red is both a ‘considerable piece of scholarship’ and an ‘absorbing read’, effused Grace Mccleen in the

Independent: Colliss Harvey ‘writes eloquently, sometimes humorously, often rousingly’. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, in the Telegraph, called it ‘bright and breezy’, with some ‘fascinating’ discussions, while Amber Pearson called it ‘engagingly informative’ in the Daily Mail.