Book description
British intellectual life between the wars stood at the heart of
modernity. The combination of a liberal, uncensored society and a
large educated audience for new ideas made Britain a laboratory for
novel ways to understand the world. The Morbid Age opens a
window onto this creative but anxious era, 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 Freud's
unconscious, to modern ideas of pacifism and world government - was
the fear that the West was facing a possibly terminal crisis of
civilization.
The modern era promised progress of a kind, but it was overshadowed
by a growing fear of decay and death, an end to the civilized world
and the arrival of a new Dark Age - even though the country had
suffered no occupation, no civil war and none of the bitter
ideological rivalries of inter-war Europe, and had an economy that
survived better than most. The Morbid Age explores how this
strange paradox came about. Ultimately, Overy shows, the coming of war
was almost welcomed as a way to resolve the contradictions and
anxieties of this period, a war in which it was believed civilization
would be either saved or utterly destroyed.
Richard Overy is Professor of History at the University of Exeter.
His books include
Why the Allies Won, Russia's War, The Battle of
Britain
and
The Dictators
, which won the Wolfson and the Hessell Tiltman Prizes for history in
2005.
