[Connolly was a very influential English critic, nonfiction writer, and literary journal editor. In the following positive review of Old Calabria, he praises Douglas's talents as a travel writer.]

This would seem to be the first edition of Old Calabria for twenty-five years. It belongs to the great tradition of English travel books: it is more solid than all the author's other work, and may well be that for which he is longest remembered.

It is introduced by Mr. John Davenport, who has some robust and original comments to make on the author. I knew him quite well myself, though I do not suppose I penetrated far beneath the surface. He was a happy man and though, I expect, very selfish, he managed to make others feel happy. This serene, ironic gaiety was not a pose nor did it proceed from an abdication of life: 'One can make just as big a fool of oneself at seventy as at thirty,' he once assured me at a time when infatuation for some young person caused him to spend painful evenings on the Big Wheels and switchbacks of a Paris circus.

Happiness is so rare among intellectuals that one wanted to know more about it. What philosophy had engendered it? What teachers, what lovers, what books? It was here that 'Uncle Norman's' reserve became impenetrable. The philosophers he admired most were those who had lived longest: Democritus, Xenophanes, Xenophilos of whom nothing is known but some hundred and fifty-odd summers.

I am inclined to think the source of his inner content was his Scots temperament and his good breeding which made him not expect too much from himself but assume the rôle of privileged onlooker without self-questioning. And he was very Scottish, with a pawky and dreadful humour, as when he re-entered a Capri café to ask 'Has anyone found a toothpick tasting of ham?' I remember seeing him set off with some younger men on an expedition to the Chartreuse de la Verne. They had not taken provisions because there was supposed to be a restaurant nearby, but Douglas lingered behind a moment, gave out his extraordinary dry crackle of a laugh and with a clownish leer revealed the end of an enormous salami under his jacket.

No author was less literary; he never rolled words or gargled quotations yet his silvery tones could infuse a fine nuance of melancholy. His scientific training was the source of his thoroughness as an observer and even of his originality. For, on the whole, he did not always write very well. Time and again in enjoying his sensibility one is brought up short by a cliché or some tritely poetic expression. For this reason he is more memorable in attack than eulogy, though here too a hint of journalism would creep in.

On the eucalyptus:

I never lose an opportunity of saying exactly what I think about this particularly odious representative of the brood, this eyesore, this greyhaired scarecrow, this reptile of a growth with which a pack of misguided enthusiasts have disfigured the entire Mediterranean basin.… A single eucalyptus will ruin the fairest landscape. No plant on earth rustles in such a horribly metallic fashion when the wind blows through those everlastingly withered branches; the noise chills one to the marrow; it is like the sibilant chattering of ghosts; its oil is called 'medicinal' only because it happens to smell rather nasty.…

And so for another hundred lines, an uneven tour de force which never comes to a head. Here is a more poetic, but, even so, strangely tawdry piece on Croton:

The temple has vanished, together with the sacred grove that once embowered it; the island of Calypso, where Swinburne took his ease (if such it was), has sunk into the purple realms of Glaucus; the corals and sea-beasts that writhed among its crevices are engulfed under mounds of submarine sand. There was life, once, at this promontory. Argosies touched here, leaving priceless gifts; fountains flowed, and cornfields waved in the genial sunshine. Doubtless there will be life again; earth and sea are only waiting for the enchanter's wand.

No, it is not as a writer of prose but as a human observer, historian, master of dialects, wine-bibber, walker and botanist that Douglas shines in Old Calabria. Even as a controversialist he is beginning to date: 'The quaint Alexandrian tutti-frutti known as Christianity.' Well, let it pass.

His travel books have a quality we lack today; he knew not only the languages but the dialects, he met people the hard way by walking and by being alone, he frequented the vanishing world of priest, mayor, chemist and village schoolmaster—then cabined and confined by poverty and malaria, now self-consciously Hollywood.

Who now in those once remote parts could find such wine (symbol of humanist tradition and sociability) so cleverly:

To this end, I generally apply to the priests; not because they are the greatest drunkards (far from it; they are mildly Epicurean or even abstemious) but by reason of their unrivalled knowledge of personalities. They know exactly who has been able to keep his liquor of such and such a year, and who has been obliged to adulterate it.… And failing the priests I go to an elderly individual of that tribe of red-nosed connoisseurs, the coachmen, ever thirsty and mercenary souls.…