Sultry Climates: travel and sex since the Grand Tour, by Ian Littlewood

Of the young sprigs of the aristocracy returning from the extended cultural excursion that came to be known as the Grand Tour, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu commented sourly that they "only remember where they met with the best Wine or the prettyest Women". Generous helpings of drink and sex, both thought to be more readily available on the Continent than at home, have been a staple of the British holiday abroad ever since.

It is partly a matter of climate, and in the concluding chapter of his sprightly cultural history, Ian Littlewood analyses the relationship between sun and sex. Travelling through France and Spain in the 18th century, Philip Thicknesse warned that "the nearer we approach to the sun, the more we become familiar with vice of every kind". That was the whole point, as Byron noted more approvingly in Don Juan: "What men call gallantry, and gods adultery,/ Is much more common where the climate's sultry."

According to a popular 18th-century guidebook, the intention of the Grand Tour was "to enrich the mind with knowledge, to rectify the judgement, to remove the prejudices of education, to compose the outward manners, and in a word to form the complete gentleman". Lord Chesterfield, whose illegitimate son was sent on his travels, frankly acknowledged that sex was part of the deal: "The Princess of Borghese was so kind as to put him a little upon his haunches, by putting him frequently upon her own," he reported. "Nothing dresses a young fellow more than having been between such pillars, with an experienced mistress."

Not everyone took so liberal a view. In 1686, Richard Lassels had noted in his Voyage of Italy that young men "travel a whole month together, to Venice, for a nights lodgeing with an impudent woman. And thus by false ayming at breeding abroad, they returne with those diseases which hinder then from breeding at home".

The Grand Tourists come into the first category of traveller Littlewood identifies: the Connoisseur. The Romantic period provided a second type, the Pilgrim. The prospect this raises of dutiful calls at holy shrines is quickly dispelled by references to Goethe's Italian Journey and Byron's continental peregrinations. "My purpose in making this wonderful journey is not to delude myself but to discover myself in the objects I see," Goethe wrote, thus marking a shift from the objective tour to the subjective one.

Byron is also an example of the last category, the Rebel, who travels largely to escape the confines of a society that disapproves of him. It usually is him, although Littlewood also deals with such intrepid and rebellious travellers as Fanny Kemble, Mary Shelley, Margaret Fuller and Lucie Duff Gordon.

To travel, Littlewood reminds us, is by its very nature transgressive: "crossing boundaries is the traveller's occupation". Some of those he discusses had already crossed boundaries, and found it politic to exile themselves to more tolerant shores. In 1811 Charles Skinner Matthews commented on Byron's good fortune at being out of England, reminding him: "that which you get for £5 we must risque our necks for". Over 150 years later, Joe Orton, ogling a teenager on Brighton beach, recalled the freedoms of Tangier and cursed England.

Littlewood is sensibly reluctant to moralise about the "sexual exploitation" of youthful foreigners, asking sharply why this should "trouble us so much more than the various kinds of exploitation that provide us with cheaper consumer goods?" Furthermore, Norman Douglas pottering round Capri with a harem of small boys is now considered beyond the pale, while Gaugain's idyll among Tahitian girls is still thought romantic, although the truth was a great deal less pretty than the paintings. Covered in syphilitic chancres, the artist boasted that he had "a 15-year-old wife who cooks my simple everyday fare and gets down on her back for me whenever I want, all for the modest rewards of a frock, worth ten francs, a month".

The appeal of the South Sea islands has had a strong sexual component from the outset. The anthropological details in John Hawkesworth's Voyages (1773), according to one indignant (male) moralist, provided women with "stronger Excitements to vicious indulgences than the most intriguing French Novel". The prelapsarian world of ease and plenty enjoyed by the islanders remains a potent image for holidaymakers. Tour operators provide beach resorts all over the world that consciously imitate a paradise that was lost ­ or, rather, destroyed by foreign visitors.

Occasional gaps appear in Ian Littlewood's short survey: he overlooks Mr Fortune's Maggot, Sylvia Townsend Warner's marvellous novel about a missionary in the South Seas, while L P Hartley and Ronald Firbank would have provided interesting sidelines on Venice and North Africa, respectively. He rounds up most of the usual suspects, however, and his whole approach and manner is refreshingly brisk.