Quotes from Michael Booth

This ungodly act is simply something that Finns do, like the British and their DIY, or the French and their adultery.

Though the Finns' taciturnity may work among themselves, problems arise when they travel or have to work with foreigners. The men, in particular, can be simply too frank, too direct, sometimes to the point of rudeness. They find it especially challenging to engage in the social lubricant of small talk, something even Norwegians can manage if they put their minds to it.

In some senses, the Finns can be considered über-Scandinavians.

They go out, they drink a lot of beer and they eat dead pigs, and then they go home and have sex with strangers afterwards.

It was so avant-garde that the fire alarm sounded for a good few minutes before the audience slowly began to realise that it wasn't part of the performance.

Living as a richer person among the poor is very stressful

Swedes don't like to ask favors of each other: they keep their problems to themselves and suffer in silence. Being duktig is one facet of this: if you are duktig then you don't need any help, and as duktighet is the ultimate ideal for Swedes; to ask for help - or even to give it - is a kind of low-level social taboo.

They had inherited a poor, patriarchal, and formal society, and turned it into a rich, feminist, and fiercely egalitarian one.

One key characteristic of Nordic cities is the lack of people. Queues, jams and crowds are a rarity in the North; even the capitals can have a semi-deserted air if you are arriving from London or New York. Where are all the people? But Helsinki made Oslo look like Mumbai.

Not even the Swedes would put camembert and Tandoori sauce in a burger.

buggies outside of cafés, that you aren't worried they will get stolen …

Scandinavia, though, really is terra incognita. The Romans didn't bother with it. Charlemagne couldn't care less.

Industrious, trustworthy and politically correct, the Scandinavians are the actuary at the party, five countries' worth of local government Liberal Democrats, finger-wagging social workers, and humourless party poopers.

Other countries love their flags,' a Danish dinner guest protested to me recently. 'Look at the Olympics!' 'Yes,' I said. 'That's true. But the French don't hoist the Tricolor on the cat's birthday.

This country of just over five million people now has the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world. And

This, truly, is the ugly side of rampant neo-liberalist capitalism," I thought to myself, leaving hurriedly. "Not even the Swedes would put Camembert and Tandoori sauce in a burger." The

The welfare state is the most important innovation of any country in the postwar period. Before it, Denmark was split between 25 percent with the highest income, 25 percent at the bottom: now we have 4 percent at the top and 4 percent at the bottom.

Before traveling to Iceland, I made a vow to myself that there were two subjects that I would not mention: Björk and elves.

The fund owns shares in over eight thousand companies, which effectively means that Norwegians own over 1 per cent of the world's listed companies, almost 2 per cent of Europe's and 0.7 per cent of Asia's.

The Swedish royal family's legitimacy is even more tenuous. The current king of Sweden, Carl XVI Gustaf, is descended neither from noble Viking blood nor even from one of their sixteenth-century warrior kings, but from some random French bloke.

The country now has the second highest GDP per capita in the world after Luxembourg, and Luxembourg is hardly a proper country.

Norwegian racism is always a kind of racism that is not prepared to accept it being qualified as such. Because we're the good guys, and racism is what bad people do.