Bermuda has been given the thumbs-up in a lengthy article in Sunday's New York Times.

Novelist Anthony Weller reveals he was sceptical about Bermuda's charms but he seems to have been won over following a visit to the Island.

Bermuda's food gets a mixed review - the writer saying Island hotels can't decide which out of date trend to follow - but Italian restaurants are given top marks.

"It never occurred to me that there was an island with virtually no resources, a rock 22 miles square in the middle of the Atlantic, which had traded for generations on little more than ingenuity and beauty to create a calm, prosperous society," he wrote.

"Less starchy than the guidebooks would have you believe, it is unfailingly polite. Best of all, unlike many small places with a colonial past, it never feels like a client state, a humbled dependant.

"Bermudians resent being lumped with other islands and will remind you, with relaxed pride, that they're as distant from the Caribbean as Washington is from Dallas.

"Bermuda is small but, on the other hand, I haven't seen anywhere else this large without any ugliness. I hadn't expected such a diverse and amiable island. Take a morning stroll in Victoria Park to see the black, white, Asian schoolkids, of every continental extraction and possible mix, hollering and playing hand in hand."

Describing a bus ride around the Island, Mr. Weller writes: "As Winslow Homer proved here in 1899, there is still an immortal calm in the watercolour disarray of a cove, a spit of beach, a peeling red and white wooden boat leaning on pale sand and fallen fronds, while an ever-changing force of intensifying blue moves horizonward."

He said dining was "always pricey and most successful when least pretentious".