Swedish thoughts

I’m now back from my fortnight in Sweden where I kept my word to give up Coffee House for a fortnight. There’s something about the country that makes it a lodestar for left and right, and the reasons why hit you as you travel around. Here are a few of my notes:-

1. At a café in Birkastan (an area of Stockholm, not a breakaway Islamic republic) I bumped into Johan Norberg one of my favourite writers. I urge anyone who hasn’t heard of him to read his small but powerful book In Defence of Global Capitalism. He’s been having some fun at Naomi Klein’s expense recently and his article “The Klein Doctrine” is published by the Cato Institute, where he’s now a senior fellow. When Norberg quit Timbro, he said on his blog that he wanted to spend his time sitting in cafes reading The Economist. This is exactly what I found him doing last week.