In Holland, the subject of one of her most satisfying chapters, she marvels at a cycling landscape that could have been reclaimed from the sea with the bicycle in mind, and discovers that, far from taking to two wheels like ducks to water, doughty Dutch velocipedists of the mid-19th century were bombarded with stones and coal by locals who accused them of traumatising the livestock.

Modern Dutch cyclists have taken the land into their own hands. She examines a road system where, thanks partly to a parallel cycle network and partly to the "bizarre" notion that cyclists have a legal and moral right to exist, the accident rate per 100km cycled is 0.8 – a tenth of that in the UK.