Travels As a Brussels Scout - Hardcover

Nick Middleton was born in London. As a geographer he has travelled to more than 50 countries and teaches part-time at Oxford University. As a travel writer he has been accused of drug smuggling and spying but has never spent a night in jail. He has been fined for dropping a match in China, mugged in Moscow, conned in Casablanca and kidnapped in Outer Mongolia, but hasn't tired of travelling yet.

Overturning the stereotype of the staid, stay-at-home geographer, Oxford geography instructor Middleton (The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia) takes readers on an irreverent tour through Western Europe in 1995, with the ostensible aim of gauging Europeans' support of, or indifference to, the European Union. Mostly, his wisecracking journey is a lark, filled with witty, shrewd observations on cultural contrasts. The egalitarian, law-abiding Swedes' civic discipline seems worlds apart from Rome's deranged traffic snarls, which the author considers symptomatic of Italy's borderline-anarchic disregard for authority. Middleton, who was underwhelmed by the Louvre's Mona Lisa, Copenhagen's Little Mermaid and the Lisbon metropolis ("the closest a European capital comes to the Third World"), is a wry traveling companion, and his intellect is wide-ranging. He seems equally at home explicating Austrians' obsession with death; the sanitized pseudo-reality of Paris's Disney park; Belgians' allegiance to their regions and cities rather than to the country as a whole; and the benefits of the E.U., for which Middleton expresses measured support. Despite the author's lighthearted tone, his serendipitous journal speaks volumes about the state of Europe today.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.