The Warm South by Robert Holland

Yale 336pp £25 The Week Bookshop £19.99

British artists and writers have long been drawn to the sunny climes of southern Europe, said Laura Freeman in The Times. From the aristocrats on their grand tours in the 18th century, to the Bloomsbury set “seeking Cézanne’s light in the 20th”, Italy, Greece and Spain have held a special appeal. In his “marvellous, transporting cultural history”, Robert Holland examines why this is. For some, venturing south was intended to be restorative: the book’s title is from a line by Keats, who died after travelling to Rome to cure his consumption. But for most travellers – Lord Byron, E.M. Forster, Oscar Wilde and D.H. Lawrence among them – the Mediterranean was a source of inspiration.

Holland’s story starts in the 17th century, said John Carey in The Sunday Times, when Titians and other masterpieces brought back from Europe by the future Charles I inspired the grand tourists to flock to the Mediterranean. In 1801, Lord Elgin’s removal of the Parthenon Marbles sparked “a craze for all things Greek” in Britain. Two decades later came what Holland describes as a “totemic moment”, said Suzi Feay in the FT: Percy Bysshe Shelley’s cremation on the beach at Viareggio, which “quasi-sanctified” the “radical outcast poet”. It is, perhaps, no coincidence that several other 19th century poets (including Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Edward Lear) subsequently ended their days in Italy. If Holland has an overrarching explanation for our centurieslong “impulse south”, it’s that Britons suffered from a “profound cultural insecurity” – one “that endured even as the British Empire began to hold sway”. His “erudite” examination of the topic is “dense but enjoyable”, packed with interesting titbits and “curious characters”.