Two brothers go out walking on Easter Sunday and discuss what they know about physics, neuroscience and evolution in the light of their belief in God. Their discussion also revolves around an imaginary dialogue between Charles Darwin and Etty Hillesum.

The latter is a young Jewish woman who held enlightened views about her belief in God. She did not survive the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Charles Darwin lost his belief in God that he had as a child and young adult. He is a watershed figure wh...

This is a book about the amazing journey of people discovering the Arctic island of Novaya Zemlya, looking for traces of a small historical event against the backdrop of the ending of the Soviet Union.

At the start of the age of exploration, the North Pole was believed to be hiding a continent, a land mass warmed by the midnight sun still inspiring today’s ‘Lost World’ fantasies. In the summer of 1596, two ships departed from Amsterdam to sail by its shores. The nine-month struggle for ...

Democracy does not solve all the problems in the world, but democracy is always better than dictatorship. To promote cred-ible elections, the EU, OSCE, Carter Centre, AU, OAS and many other organizations field international election observers. These observers are a special kind of people. They go where nobody else goes. To the local people in far-off provinces they are a shining light. To (semi)dictators it means that there are limits as to what they can get away with. In this book, journalis...

Tipping the Balance was inspired by love for the author’s birth-place, Warnsveld in Gelderland’s De Achterhoek; the seasons, small farmlets with golden fields, the leafy lanes and rivers flowing slowly through the landscape. Jenneken’s life is shattered when she learns that her mother Alida’s knowledge and use of herbal remedies is considered to be witchcraft and that she must undergo a weighing trial in Oude- water. Jenneken fears also for her own safety as she has followed her mothe...

There are several biographies about Erich Ludendorff. What most of them have in common is that they stop at the year 1918, the end of the First World War. This is un-justified. At the peak of his long career, between 1915 and roughly 1925, Ludendorff developed into the strongest man on the ‘right’. Thus, the years after the war were also of great importance. He was not only an important general who, with Paul von Hin-denburg, was in supreme command of Germany’s de facto military leaders...