Peter Taylor-Gooby (Kent): “Never Waste a Crisis”: Is Now a Good Time for Progressive Welfare State Reform? From the Nordic Journal of Working Life Studies, a special issue on the Nordic working life model. From Society and Space, a series on book reviews on walls and (post)cosmopolitanisms in Central and Eastern Europe. From Cafe Babel, Gianni Contarino on how the European macho man going extinct; and male seduction: “pick-up artists” hunt for women in Germany. From the Dublin Review of Books, many economic and banking crises of recent decades are pedestrian by comparison with what we in Ireland achieved in the 2000s and beyond, and we arguably need to reach further back in history to find financial catastrophes that match the scale and colour of our own. Don MacRaild reviews The Curse of Reason: The Great Irish Famine by Enda Delaney. The Vikings are back with a vengeance, writes Jeffrey Richards. War was central to Europe's first civilization, contrary to popular belief.
