Tom Dunne examines the Crawford Art Gallery’s exploration of artistic responses to fear, from the late eighteenth century to the present

It is indeed an ‘Age of Anxiety’. In addition to the horrors of war and of economic collapse, which characterised the decades after World War I — the period to which historians have normally applied the term — we live in an age of global warming and global terrorism, our anxieties ratcheted up on an hourly basis by hyperactive global media
On the eve of his show at the Hunt Museum, Limerick, in Winter 2009 Joseph McBrinn considered the unique aesthetic Rudolf Heltzel has brought to jewellery design.