Swiss Watching: Inside the Land of Milk and Money - Softcover

Diccon Bewes is an experienced travel writer who has lived in Switzerland for four years. An 18-month world trip set him up for a career in travel writing, via the scenic route of bookselling. After ten years at Lonely Planet and Holiday Which? magazine, he decamped to Switzerland, where he is currently manager of the Stauffacher English Bookshop in Bern. As well as grappling with German, re-learning to cross the road properly, and overcoming his innate desire to form an orderly queue, he has spent the last four years exploring the bits of the country he'd never heard of before and eating lots of chocolate.

We all know that Switzerland gave us the world of cuckoo clocks, triangular chocolate and penknives, but how about the Toilet Duck, Velcro and LSD? Europe s landlocked island is a great subject for a cultural anthropologist and Bewes is a perfect guide. (Financial Times)

Bewes has an engagingly light and comic touch. The narrative moves with ease between subjects as diverse as graffiti and recycling, and it s easy to dip in and out of. (Sunday Telegraph)

"Informative and Entertaining."--Harry Ritchie, The Mail on Sunday

"It's a real page turner, a treasure trove. Absolutely jam-packed with fascinating facts that really got me thinking." --Margaret Oertig-Davidson, author of Beyond Chocolate

"Everything you wanted to know about Switzerland, and then some. Not just a travel book, Swiss Watching is a no-stone-unturned exploration of what makes (and has made) this enigmatic country tick' --Peter Kerr, author of the Snowball Orange series of five books

"A fascinating book, teeming with facts, figures, and anecdotes which even the Swiss don t know. A journalist, anthropologist and satirist, Diccon Bewes gives us a book that is serious without being academic and funny without ever falling into caricature." --L Hebdo