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The book The Legacy of Dutch Brazil offers a rich collection of contributions on Johan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen’s stay in Brazil as statesman and governor of New Holland, but also on the cultural legacy of that period in the Netherlands, B...

Reinier Salverda scrutinises the translation of what still is “the greatest novel ever in Dutch literature”.

Between 1600 and 1900, Dutch was the dominant European language in Japan. A new book examines how this affected the local culture and society.

The first organised slave revolt on the American continent to a colonial governor took place in Berbice, now part of Guyana.

Lovers of Frisian literature and translation gathered at University College London for an evening of Frisian culture around the great new bilingual anthology Swallows and Floating Horses.

‘Postcolonial Mirror’ and ‘New Colonial Reading List’ are two new important books on Dutch East Indies literature. Both editions aim at a complete revision of the existing image.

The United Kingdom and The Netherlands' shared history has a big and often funny impact on each other's language.

In recent years, there has been renewed interest in Great Britain in 'Reynard the Fox', a masterpiece of medieval Dutch literature.

After 132 years, Gorter's masterpiece has finally been published in English, even in two versions.

A lifetime after the end of the colonial era, Dutch Indies literature still plays off colonial myths and realities against each other, and finds words for painful, half-forgotten things.

The Dutch language has all but vanished from Indonesia. However, it remains an important language of education in the country.

A Review of two books on the history of Royal Dutch Shell.

About the long, rich and continuing history of the Dutch Reformed Church at Austin Friars in the City of London. After 444 years it is alive and well – a corner of a foreign field that is forever Holland.

Animal tales are among the most ancient, widespread and enduringly popular forms of storytelling. In Low Countries literature, one animal tale stands out in particular: Reynard the Fox, a brilliant contribution to the genre. Ranking fourth...

Ana Torfs’s beautifully crafted, enchanting, experimental and postcolonial installations start out from established European conventions of art and reality, but then step outside and present us with a multimodal Gesamtkunstwerk, made with ...

The letters and photographs published in a beautiful new book cover the last two years of Margaretha Zelle (1876-1917) before she left the Netherlands and began a new life in Paris, becoming famous the world over from 1905 as the oriental ...

What we have before us here are two substantial scholarly monographs by one British academic, both focussing on the history of Dutch in contact with other languages, in the Dutch Republic of course, but especially also in early modern Brit...

Michel Foucault may have predicted the end of the humanities, but today Digital Humanaties, the digital revolution and the virtual world are offering a new beginning. In the process, our humanities research and how this is being done will ...

People often regard European multilingualism as an issue of power, of might is right. Not so Van Parijs, the Belgian political philosopher. He develops for the actual reduction of unfairness principles of cooperation, parity of esteem and t...

The Grand Dutch Novel of the nineteenth century has seen three complete English translations. The book continues to inspire the worldwide struggle for humanity and justice

English is necessary, useful and beneficial as a global lingua franca, but there is and will always be linguistic diversity and multilingualism. We will always need other languages besides English.

The Coppenhagen Collection has recently been acquired by the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. This collection was built up by three generations of the Coppenhagen family in Amsterdam, Isaac (1846-1905), Haim (1874-1942) and Jaco...

For a number of years now the Council of Europe in Strasbourg has conducted a programme for the evaluation of the national cultural policies of its member states. In 1993 it was the Netherlands' turn to be assessed (review of ‘Cultural Poli...

All around the world today, English, as the language of globalisation, is rapidly spreading everywhere. In a number of EU member states this development has triggered debate about the future of their own national language. The language issu...

Kousbroek is the author of an oeuvre of mesmerising richness and diversity, ranging from poetry and language, photography, the archaeology of motorcars, travel, literature, children, cats and other animals, through memory, emotions and the ...

Review of ‘Dutch Masters and Their Era. English Language Studies by the Dutch, from the last century into the Present' (ed. F. Stuurman; Amsterdam, 1993).

About efforts and initiatives in the field of Frisian cultural and linguistic policy and the production of new and succesful works of art and imagination in Frisian which enhance the quality and diversity of Frisian cultural life.

Review of Frances Gouda's 'Dutch Culture Overseas: Colonial Practice in the Netherlands Indies' 1900-1942' (Amsterdam, 1995)

Review of E.M. Beekman's 'Troubled Pleasures. Dutch Colonial Literature from the East Indies 1600-1950' (Oxford, 1996).

About Dutch and Flemish books in a number of London collections, constituting a cultural capital waiting to be discovered and explored.

About the Standard Grammar of the Dutch Language (ANS).

Review of 'Dutch Poetry in Translation: Kaleidoscope. From Medieval Times to the Present' (Wilmette, IL, 1998) and 'Modern Poetry in Translation: Dutch and Flemish Issue' (London, 1998)

Review of Kees Groeneboer's 'Gateway to the West. The Dutch Language in Colonial Indonesia 1600-1950'. This book is not only a history of the subject, but also vividly demonstrates why for the foreseeable future Dutch will remain an indispe...

Salverda discusses the multilingualism of Dutch society as the consequence of continuing migration. The strong, open economy attracts people to the Netherlands from a multitude of countries, so that today over a hundred languages are spoken...

Georg Rumphius' The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet, originally published in 1705, has been translated into English and published in a beautiful scholarly edition by E.M. Beekman. It is a book about the shells of the Moluccas.The translation is ...

A review of Geert Mak's Jorwerd, the Death of the Village in Late Twentieth-Century Europe, an account of the slow death of the small village in the northern province of Friesland where the author spent his youth (Geert Mak, Jorwerd. The De...

The central theme of Elsbeth Locher-Scholten's new book on Women and the Colonial State is how, especially and increasingly during the first half of the twentieth century, Dutch and Indonesian women, despite their shared aspirations, were k...

Review of Unspoken Allies, a book focussing on Anglo-Dutch relations between 1780 and 1980 (Nigel Ashton et al., Unspoken Allies. Anglo-Dutch Relations since 1780. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2001).

Review of Words of the World, a book on language rivalry in the global language system (Abram de Swaan, Words of the World. The Global Language System. Cambridge: Polity Press/ Blackwell, 2001)

History has left many a Dutch mark on the English language. There is a sizeable English vocabulary of Dutch origin and borrowing from Dutch is an ongoing process, as witness recent additions like apartheid, coffeeshop, lekker and gabber mus...

About the work of the Dutch novelist and playwright Jan de Hartog, who died in Houston, TX, in September 2002. He was a very successful writer who settled in the US in the 1950s and started to write in English at that time. In the Netherlan...

Ernst Heinrich Kossmann (1922-2003) was one of the most outstanding Dutch historians of the post-war era. He was also a central figure in Anglo-Dutch relations, both while he taught Dutch history at University College London in the early si...

For many years now the languages spoken by immigrant minorities in the countries of Europe have been the main concern of Professor Guus Extra of the University of Brabant in Tilburg, who has now published a substantial academic monograph on...

Georg Rumphius (1627-1702) can be considered the founder of Indonesian botanical exploration In 1999 Professor E.M. Beekman published a monumental scholarly edition in English of Rumphius' Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet (1705). Continuing this ...

Today, as a result of almost four decades of innovative sociolinguistic research by scholars such as Durk Gorter of the Fryske Akademy in Leeuwarden, we are rather well-informed about the actual state of the Frisian language. But although i...

Review of two books about Jews in the Netherlands: Jonathan Israel and Reinier Salverda (eds.), Dutch Jewry, Its History and Secular Culture (1500-2000). Leiden / Boston / Cologne: Brill, 2002 and J.C.H. Blom, R.G. Fuks-Mansfeld and I. Schö...

The legacy of the Dutch historians Johan Huizinga and Pieter Geyl can hardly be overestimated.

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