From the Belfast Telegraph:
* Iceland is the only member nation of Nato that has no armed forces, these having been abolished in the 14th century.
* Only a tiny fraction of the country's 679 police officers - an elite crisis unit called the Vikings - carry guns.
* With an annual murder rate below five, the sum total of the country's prison population is 118.
* Iceland has the highest density of mobile phones per capita in the world (there are more mobiles than people) and three quarters of the population is on the internet.
*Infant mortality is the fifth lowest in the world and life expectancy higher than in all but 10 of the planet's 226 nations.
* Reykjavik is the most northern capital in the world and Iceland is further north than most of Alaska but, while the winters are dark, they are several degrees milder than New York's.
* Iceland boasts the world's oldest functioning parliament, the Althing, founded in 930.
* The hot water in every home is provided free, courtesy of nature, via underground volcanic passages; no nation has had more recorded volcanic eruptions than Iceland, which has 33 volcanoes.
* Iceland (the size of England) is the seventh least densely populated country in the world (the first is Mongolia) and is 25th in the list of countries with the fewest people in them (here the Vatican comes tops).
* 0.07 per cent of Iceland's land is arable; 12 per cent is covered by glaciers.
* Iceland legalised gay marriages in 1996.
* Private education and private health care do not exist - the state facilities are so good that there is no demand.
* Icelanders are investing so massively abroad that their banks are growing faster than any other country's, by far.
* Icelanders buy more books per capita than any other nation on earth.
* Jorge Luis Borges, the greatest writer never to receive a Nobel prize, was a huge fan of the Icelandic sagas, of which he wrote: "In the 12th century the Icelanders discover the novel, the art of Cervantes and Flaubert, and that discovery is as secret and as sterile for the rest of the world as their discovery of America."
"A lot of people I spoke to in Iceland agreed that a large reason for the country's success was the absence of the cultural, religious, political and tribal baggage that other nations accumulate over time. Baggage that, as the minister of education observed to me, weighs other countries down, and gets in the way of intelligent, practical, natural solutions to the elementary problems of life."
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