Excerpt:
The British writer who this week savaged Norway as "the most insular and xenophobic" of the Scandinavian nations has described his article as "deliberately provocative".
Michael Booth, whose wife in Danish and who has lived on-and-off in Denmark for a decade, working as a correspondent for Monocle Magazine, stressed that the article was not writte "specifically to upset Norwegians".
"The piece was a deliberately provocative opinion piece designed to wake Guardian readers from their Scandinavian trance," he said. "The Brits have been fed a diet of 100% positive stories about the North for the last few years. I felt it was time to add some balance to the reporting, and to do that I definitely employed some exaggeration - and humour."