Richard Overy's book, The Morbid Age, opens a window to the creative yet anxious period between the two World Wars. British intellectual life during this time was at the heart of the modern age, marking the golden age of the public intellectual and the scientist: Arnold Toynbee, Aldous and Julian Huxley, H. G. Wells, Marie Stopes, and many others. However, as Richard Overy argues, a striking characteristic of the ideas that emerged from this new era - from eugenics to the Freudian unconscious, to contemporary ideas of pacifism and global governance - was the fear that the West faces a dystopian future with war, economic collapse, and racial degeneration.
With exceptional vividness, Overy depicts a Britain brimming with BBC lectures, public discussions, peaceful demonstrations, pamphlets, psychoanalysts, anti-fascist volunteers, sex education handbooks, and science fiction. The Morbid Age reveals a period that is both different from and eerily similar to our own.
Richard Overy is a 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 Hessell Tiltman prizes for history in 2005.
Pages: 544, Dimensions: 12.8x12.8cm
