The Morbid Age

Richard Overy''s The Morbid Age opens a window onto the creative but anxious period between the First and Second World Wars.

British intellectual life between the wars stood at the heart of modernity; it was the golden age of the public intellectual and scientist: Arnold Toynbee, Aldous and Julian Huxley, H. G. Wells, Marie Stopes and a host of others. Yet, as Richard Overy argues, a striking characteristic of so many of the ideas that emerged from this new age - from eugenics to the Freudian unconscious, to modern ideas of pacifism and world government - was the fear that the West was faced a dystopian future of war, economic collapse and racial degeneration.

Brilliantly evoking a Britain of BBC radio lectures, public debates, peace demonstrations, pamphleteers, psychoanalysts, anti-fascist volunteers, sex education manuals and science fiction, The Morbid Age reveals a time at once different from, and yet surprisingly similar to, our own.