Ben Coates

Why the Dutch are Different began with a missed flight, a Dutch woman and a decision not to go home. Coates had worked in British politics and then moved to the Netherlands, and what he wrote is half travel writing and half social history: the water and what holding it back does to a society, the tolerance and where it stops, the occupation and how it is remembered, and why everybody is so tall. He has written since about the Rhine and about Nigeria. The affection in it is genuine and it is not a brochure.