Robert Holland's The Warm South offers an engaging examination of the Mediterranean's role in British cultural identity formation. Holland does not present a history of British activity in the Mediterranean as a region, but rather he provides a wealth of perspectives showing the Mediterranean as a stage upon which the British acted out their pursuit of a cultural aesthetic. The historical motivations for this pursuit are, for Holland, continually rooted in cultural insecurity and uncertainty, linked to moments of both domestic and foreign crisis and transition. While the basic motivation remains consistent, The Warm South embraces a multitudinous and layered understanding of the British imagination of the Mediterranean. This is a complex tale, acknowledging that from insecurity arose a plethora of contingent cultural responses.

Though Holland emphasizes the variety of British perceptions of the Mediterranean and the fractured nature of the Mediterranean itself, it is worth noting that his analysis does not include the entire region. The book primarily focuses on Italy, Greece, and Spain, with a sprinkling of attention to the various islands. Nearly entirely neglected, therefore, is the existence of an African or Middle Eastern Mediterranean. Holland acknowledges this exclusion in his first chapter, arguing that even when interactions with these other Mediterranean spheres occurred, they were still mediated through the classic European South. He notes that it was “familiar otherness” that drew the British to the Mediterranean but not into the African or Arab world (17). While this is a compelling argument that brings nuance to a line of inquiry stretching back to Said, Holland's limited scope is nonetheless noteworthy.

The structure of the book is both chronological and geographical, with each chapter after the first progressing in time while working through different arenas of the Mediterranean, usually starting with Italy, moving to Greece, and concluding with Spain. While straightforward in approach, each chapter takes the reader through a truly incredible array of art, literature, architecture, and more, using both vibrant descriptions and an excellent selection of images. Holland provides powerful insight into familiar characters such as Emma Hamilton and Oscar Wilde, while also bringing to the foreground lesser-known figures like Edward Dodwell. And while The Warm South is overtly and consciously a cultural history, Holland does not ignore political and social dynamics at play in shaping culture. These dynamics are admittedly often relegated to the background, but this is a book primarily about cultural imagination, and Holland leads the reader well through that jungle.

Holland's first chapter serves as an introduction, articulating the need to incorporate the Mediterranean into the history of British culture and establishing the sense of cultural insecurity that plagued Britain. The second takes the last sixty years of the eighteenth century to establish the origins of the British fascination with the Mediterranean, especially through the pull of the Grand Tour. The next four chapters take the reader through the nineteenth century in thirty-year increments. In the third chapter, “Distorted Mirror,” Holland highlights the role of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in solidifying the British turn to the Mediterranean as a necessary reflection of British values. At the same time, however, he clearly demonstrates the competing and often contradictory nature of those values as Romanticism emerged, and the ability of the Mediterranean to be used for diverse purposes.

The fourth chapter moves the British interaction with the Mediterranean from distorted reflection to a more active source of contrast and comparison. The social changes of the period from 1830 to 1860 were profound, and Holland shows again the flexibility of the Mediterranean in the British imagination to process the “essential fragility” of the times (131). The fifth chapter, “Enchanted Garden,” travels another thirty years forward, now towards the end of the Victorian era. As Europe began to experience even further disruption and angst, Holland detects in the continued British turn to the Mediterranean the desire to maintain a sense of continuity with the past. This was often at odds with the political and cultural changes many places in the Mediterranean experienced in the 1860s, especially Italy, and Holland's point comes through strongly here as he shows the dissonance between the real Mediterranean and the imagined British versions.

Holland's penultimate chapter, “The Cult of Beauty,” continues the theme of British fascination with the Mediterranean springing from a fear that they lacked their own authentic and mature civilization (193). Holland is not blind to the rapid and drastic changes modernism brought to British culture, which seem to move beyond the Mediterranean as a subject, but he sees in the continued pursuit of beauty a “homing instinct … that led South” (221). In the final chapter, “The Splendid Enclosure,” Holland brings his argument to the present. That fragile British identity remains, this time in the wake of World Wars and in the context of the European Union, and the Mediterranean remains its partner, echoing and reinforcing British cultural identity.

This final chapter highlights one of the few potential weaknesses in The Warm South. The Mediterranean exists in this book exists primarily as a British conception, with limited space devoted to the agency or pushback of the Mediterranean actors themselves. This is understandable, as that added layer of complexity would potentially detract from the already complex variations within the British perspective that Holland elucidates so well. However, it leaves an image of culture as emerging primarily from a wellspring of national insecurity, with little room for outside influences. This is particularly problematic in the twentieth century, where Holland could have spent more space tracing other sources that have assuaged British insecurity, answering the question of what, if anything, replaced the Mediterranean in British imagination. Still, this does not significantly detract from the power of Holland's overall argument and the impressive accessibility of his work. The need of the British for a canvas on which to paint and the flexibility of the Mediterranean to be a canvas that allowed for multiple painters comes through clear and powerfully. The Warm South is essential reading for any scholar seeking to engage with British culture, particularly in the long nineteenth century.