A medical view on ‘the value of life’ can be inferred from medical accounts of the quality of life: a life has value if it embodies certain qualities. Scales have been developed to quantify quality of life. While the term ‘quality of life’ is used frequently in everyday discourse, perceptions of what it might actually mean differ greatly and are often incompatible. This incompatibility can be illustrated through an examination and extension of the Greek myth of Sisyphus. The different models explored in this paper rest on ‘significant toil’, ‘choice’, ‘happiness or well-being’, or ‘social factors’ being the prerequisite for quality of existence. These models are incommensurable and, as intangible concepts, cannot be quantified. Decision-making in medicine does not require a complex evaluation of the quality of life: it consists of the doctor's offer of treatment based on the best evidence, and the patient's consent to, or refusal of, that offer. Apart from the need to obtain consent, the main ethical constraint on the doctor is equity.

The significance of emotion and social experiences in young children's growing understanding of emotion and mind is discussed here. There is evidence for early mind-reading, and the role of emotional experience in these developments; differentiation of various aspects of social understanding is indicated from studies of discourse, and longitudinal research. The challenges to be addressed in research on links between affect and cognition include a focus on children at risk of relationship problems, on the relations between attachment and mind-reading, and on possible developmental changes in the connections between emotion and social understanding.

The first of the three waves of economic development covering the 20th century started back in the previous century. The factors determining the success of this so-called ‘long 19th century’ were ideological and political, as well as economical. They generated, at the end of that wave, the move towards the first global economy. During the second wave (1914–1945), economic liberalism and globalisation came under pressure. The mixed economy of the postwar period – the framework of the third wave – initiated a trend towards a new global economy, covering ‘les trente années glorieuses’ (1945–1973), the uncertain 1970s, and the restructuring of the economy along neo-liberal lines (1980s and 1990s). What will be the economic future of Europe?

Medieval lawsuits from the highest courts of England and France show the concern of authorities for even minor issues involving ordinary people – a democratic and modern trait. In comparing the English Court of Common Pleas to the Parlement of Paris, it can be seen that classical Roman law made a great impact on France, while the English Court ignored Roman law and applied English customary law and acts of Parliament. The Parlement of Paris also had to apply local customs, but its judges had all studied Roman and no customary law at the university; however, for political reasons they were not allowed to refer openly to the Roman law in which they had been educated. The jury was a major medieval contribution to modern democratic thinking, as was the political idea that matters concerning the whole community ought to be decided by all its members. The American power-sharing system, between President and Congress, continues the late medieval balance between King and Parliament. English common law was one of the great creations of the Middle Ages and the only system of comparable importance is continental civil law (with Germanic and Roman roots). This paper considers the chances of the elaboration in the 21st century of a common European law combining elements from both traditions.

A war of nine years duration led to the loss of the French colonies in Asia, but Indo-China did not have the impact in French eyes that North Africa and, in particular, Algeria had. In comparison, the French were not required to leave Indo-China either immediately or totally. Economic interests were retained until 1975, as was the pursuit of important cultural activities. Departure in 1975 left a memory that was partly nostalgic and partly bitter, but it revealed a conflict with the French community as well as with the Indo-Chinese.

The theme of what the end of empire meant to metropolitan politics and society is less developed in recent British historiography than in its French and Dutch counterparts. This article examines why, in the British case, decolonization was able to be handled in such a way that relatively little turbulence was transmitted to the Home nation. The essence of that decolonization lay in the separation of metropolitan affairs from overseas transitions. In particular, the loss of colonial sovereignties did not become entangled with national decline. The outcome is a received wisdom compatible with long-standing notions of British constitutionalism, pragmatism and liberty.

The decolonization of Indonesia is far from being a peripheral issue for Dutch national identity. Since the 1970s, but especially in 1995, public debate has erupted in an attempt to come to terms with this part of national history. The protestant ethic is still so strong that discussions revolve in particular around morality and a final verdict. Opinion leaders and historians have, however, not been able to solve the issue, so that the way in which the Netherlands lost their Southeast-Asian colony continues to trouble the Dutch self-image.

A copious sea literature exists in nineteenth-century France, and the works of such figures as Hugo, Baudelaire, Michelet and Rimbaud contain a recurrent tension between two divergent views of maritime experience. On the one hand, the sea offers the encouraging spectacle of endless possibility and plurality, but on the other hand it is an emblem of intellectual defeat and of humankind at the mercy of an inhospitable natural world. In major works by Mallarmé (1842–98) and Debussy (1862–1918) this contradiction is placed centre stage. The poet and the musician have found ingenious ways of maintaining intellectual and artistic control while constructing ‘open’ textures designed to recreate the sensations of chaos and contingency. In both works – Un Coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard (1897) and La Mer (1905) – the remorseless action of the sea is associated with the periodic achievement and loss of aesthetic structure.

A shift in seeing took place in Western Europe, marked by the transition from the geometrical optics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the physiological optics of the nineteenth century. Within the same time-frame, the sea (like the mountains) came to be valued as an entity in itself, and not just as a source of challenge, danger or ecstasy. The coupling of these two phenomena makes for the tracking of parallel effects: the diminution of anthropocentricity in the change from monocular to binocular vision; the substitution of plurality of point of view for the recessional perspective of the Renaissance; and a revisitation of the interrelationships and metamorphoses characteristic of the Baroque in terms of new polyvalent or interdisciplinary approaches.

In the first years of the fifth century AD a Greek gentleman in his early 30s embarked from the harbour of the great city of Alexandria on a sailing ship bound for his native Cyrene. It is a voyage of about 780 km, approximately the distance from Venice to the mouth of the Adriatic, or a little longer than from Hamburg to London. We are not sure about the season or the year; we only know that the voyage took place towards the end of a month; that is, a Greek lunar month, an ill-omened time for sailing, according to the belief of the Ancients. The traveller was Synesius, who belonged to a distinguished Cyrenian family, and was returning from a diplomatic mission in Constantinople, at the court of an Empire that would survive and bear the name ‘Roman’ for more than 1000 years. However, the empire of the ‘real’ Rome would find its real end in little more than 70 years.

The Vikings initially ventured into the Irish Sea as raiders and took, from the monasteries and other rich centres, wealth in the form of goods and slaves. In the course of the tenth century, however, they became permanently established and founded and developed the first towns in Ireland, often under sufferance from the local population. From these towns they controlled the trade routes along the western coasts of Europe through the Irish Sea — routes that brought luxury goods to both the North and the South. The increasing economic power of the Irish towns was one of the factors that led to the English conquest of Ireland in 1170.

It is suggested that the main impact of Sweden, Norway and Denmark upon Europe stems from their development into early welfare states with well-functioning political systems and social institutions. It is shown that their ways to this position were remarkably individual, and also that the seemingly identical Nordic states of this century have only to a rather limited extent been able to act in unity. The popular attitudes towards each other have been distinctly positive, but basically differing interests with regard to world politics and world economies have time and again made the politicians let raison d'état prevail.

The Nordic countries of Europe have many common traits. They are small countries in Northern Europe, they have been Lutheran since the Reformation, and they had, for centuries, a strong landholding peasantry but a weak aristocracy. They developed a comprehensive welfare state after the Second World War, and they are more sceptical about European integration than people from other countries in Western Europe. Despite attempts to create a Nordic union and the existence of a Nordic Council, their joint Nordic orientation has been subordinated to the national interests of the individual Nordic countries. They are clear-cut nation states with a nationalism that is not fierce, but represents a kind of official, controlled and uniform national spirit. With respect to parliamentary politics and social policy the main features of the countries have been called the Nordic Model. The model still exists, but rests on shakier ground than before.