THE WARM SOUTH

HOW THE MEDITERRANEAN SHAPED THE BRITISH IMAGINATION

ROBERT HOLLAND Yale, 336pp, £25, Oldie price £16.74 inc p&p

Taking his title from John Keats’s

Ode to a Nightingale, and its sigh for ‘a beaker full of the warm South’, Robert Holland examines the appeal to the British, poetic, cultural and physical, of the Mediterranean climate and culture. Many went there to die, hoping that the warmth would heal consumptive lungs: for northern Europeans, as Holland puts it, death in the Med had a certain ‘frisson’. But then, as Frances Wilson put it in the Literary

Review, ‘ The Warm South is equally about the cold north.’ Or, according to Suzi Feay in the

Financial Times, ‘As this sweeping survey shows, Britain has for centuries emulated, envied, denigrated and defined itself in opposition to its southern cousins.’

Wilson thought ‘Holland paints a large canvas with broad brushstrokes, paying little attention to detail’ but other reviewers were thrilled by the big picture. Laura Freeman in the

Sunday Times found a ‘marvellous, transporting cultural history’, loving the way it drew on both ‘high culture and low telly’. ‘Holland writes of the frigid North and sexualised South of romantic imagination. There’s a reason Love

Island is filmed on Mallorca, not Arran.’ And in the Sunday Times, John Carey was equally transported by the author’s ‘boundless enthusiasm and seemingly limitless reading’. Carey praised a ‘searching, original book that takes Keats’s phrase and hugely widens its scope. When, Holland asks, did our dream of a freer, sun-blessed, idyllic life by the shores of the Mediterranean begin? When did the belief that southerners are more sensually alive, and better at art, than we are first gain currency? How did our political and cultural interest in Italy, Greece and Spain develop over the centuries?’

‘A marvellous, transporting cultural history’