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Frozen Canals, Open Water: How the Low Countries Taught the World to Play
5 October 2026
Lace up a pair of skates, hoist a sail or watch a football team swap positions mid-attack, and you're doing something the Low Countries had a hand in. Flat land, a long coastline and water everywhere, frozen in winter and liquid the rest of the year, gave the Dutch and Flemish an unusual playground,
Gaston Eysselinck, The Outdoor Stairs Architect
5 October 2026
The group photo of the 1930 CIAM congress in Brussels, that year's summit of Europe's modernist architects, shows Le Corbusier, Gropius and Mies van der Rohe. Among them, a 23-year-old Flemish architect. Back home in Ghent, people called him "the outdoor stairs architect", and they did not mean it k
“If You Love Language, You’ll Never Be Bored” – In Memoriam Paulien Cornelisse
5 October 2026
The Dutch language has lost its most curious listener. Paulien Cornelisse, who died on 30 September 2026, aged 50, was a household name in the Netherlands, and a familiar one in Flanders. Her 2009 book about everyday Dutch sold 700,000 copies in a language with some 24 million speakers. She took the
Zeeland-Flanders, Nursery of Flanders and the Netherlands
28 September 2026
A distant periphery in the Netherlands, it is abroad for those in Flanders: the area of province of Zeeland-Flanders is a strip of land that does not seem to belong to either of them. But it is also the place – along the southern bank of the river Scheldt – where the two countries merge,
Special Delivery: How One Family Made Brussels Europe’s Post Office
21 September 2026
The sun is setting as a relay rider urges his horse onward towards a small stone building in the distance. The man blows a loud blast on his horn and a light appears in the window. After a bit of commotion in the building, a fresh horse and a courier stand ready and waiting, when the rider pulls up
How Flemish Refugees Rewove England’s Fortunes
21 September 2026
Few things seem more quintessentially English than wool. Yet the transformation of English fleece into fashionable, saleable cloth owed a great deal to newcomers from across the North Sea. In the second half of the sixteenth century, thousands of Protestant refugees from the Low Countries settled in
Architect Léon Stynen, a Lyrical Modernist
21 September 2026
He had a predilection for concrete, but never lost sight of elegance. His slender, tall buildings embodied the economically booming Belgium of the sixties, but at the same time art and architecture remained intertwined for him. Three books reintroduce us to the modernist work of Léon Stynen.
Exceptionalism: a Dutch Virtue
21 September 2026
The Calvinistically inspired self-image of the Dutch as sober, frugal and tolerant? Away with it, say Saskia Pieterse and Janneke Stegeman. For far too long the Dutch have abused their status as God’s people to enrich themselves at the expense of other communities and cultures.
My superpower? Making sense of story structures!
14 September 2026
Our language columnist has discovered a new superpower. Marten van der Meulen became fascinated by story structures, and once you start studying them, you uncover all sorts of unwritten rules.
From Holland With Love: How the Dutch Mapped East Asia
14 September 2026
Gerardus Mercator gave the world a way to flatten the globe onto a map. Willem Blaeu and his son Joan turned that skill into an atlas empire. Their names are still attached to the maps and globes that shaped how people in Japan and Taiwan first pictured the world beyond their shores, and left behind
The Optical Revolution: Made in Holland
14 September 2026
Look up at the night sky, or down into a drop of water, and you're seeing the world the way the Dutch taught us to see it. In the early seventeenth century, refinements to lenses and advances in mathematics let people see further into the distance and deeper into the impossibly small than ever befor
