Product 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #91448 in Books
• Published on: 2009-05-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 544 pages

Review
`wonderfully compelling ... never less than a delight to read ... supremely well informed, thoughtful and enjoyable' --Dominic Sandbrook, Evening Standard

'Overy is a mighty figure, one of the great historians of the second world war'
--Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times

Review
`The Morbid Age is history at its best'

Review
`a rewarding book, and a highly readable one'

Customer Reviews

Disappointment
Overy's works on WW2 are masterpieces which I read and re-read with great pleasure and admiration, so this strangely prolix history of ideas between the Wars is a sad disappointment. It's as though he is writing for the first time and just doesn't know what material to leave out. Why do we need to know that the Webbs disagreed with the printer of their book about the colour of the cover and the thickness of paper?

That said the basic idea - that the inter war period was obsessed with pessimism and visions of a catastrophic future, indeed in some sense 'needed' to believe the worst - is an interesting one, with obvious parallels today. We have nothing to fear but fear itself - but that'll do just fine, thanks. There are many gems, such as the alarm sounded by one biolgist that the UK population would shrink to just 4m by 2035.
It's just that it is needlessy heavy going, unlike his other books that are so beautifully written.

For a historian, Overy says little about WW1 and the trauma that left for survivors and the bereaved, which surely was the basis for the collapse in belief in 'progress' and 'reason' that he charts, or the impact of the Depression which re-inforced those feelings. This leaves his analysis of ideas slightly oddly floating free of the world they sprang from.

Finishing the book, knowing that an equally horric war was about to start, what is perplexing is not the despair felt by so many in the 30s, which seems eminently reasonable, but the belief in a better, more prosperous, better organised and more socially just future that sprang seemingly ready formed out of the ruins of 1945, despite Auschwitz and the atom bomb, and which has lasted more or less until now. Nowadays, we can all do despair: but can we learn to do optimism? That might make another book on the post war world - but, please, a shorter one.

People have always worried
We feel threatened by all manner of disasters from terrorism to global warming. Has it always been so? Richard Overy takes us back to the era between the two world wars of the 20th century to emphasise that fear of change and the future is nothing new. Then it was concern about biological sickness in 'inferior' individuals, families and groups, inescapable psychological sickness inherent in our pre-natal development, the evils of the capitalist system, dread of future, even more catastrophic wars and the resulting dilemma - was it better to fight fascism or remain a pacifist whatever the provocation? Some fears proved justified but others didn't, not least because information was increasingly avialable. Awareness of what people have achieved through knowledge and protest is much more comforting than recourse to alcohol or valium. This is a splendid, irresistible book by an academic who explains the issues clearly but in a scholarly fashion that treats readers as serious students, not dilettanti. The reader returning to each reading session re-enters a lecture theatre in the author's presence. Read it to feel less helpless.

Fascinating but flawed
I found this book heavy going at first but once I got beyond the opening chapters it was enthralling. Overy paints a vivid picture of the fears which obsessed intellectuals of the period and also demonstrates how these views were spread and debated through hundreds of local and national groups and organisations - the Peace Pledge Union, the Eugenics Society etc. What strikes the reader today is how some fears - like the conviction war was inevitable - came horribly true, while others - like the idea Britain's population would fall dramatically - proved way off-beam. (Which will our modern obsession with climate change turn out to be like?)
However, I felt Overy didn't give sufficient coverage to the official/government response to the ideas and movements he describes, and thus leaves the reader with the feeling that perhaps many of the characters who move through his pages were ultimately just ineffectual busybodies who left no real mark on history. International comparison is also beyond the book's scope so there is little discussion of how it came about that Britain avoided the fate of Germany, Spain or Italy in the same period.
Despite the reservations though I would certainly recommend the book for anyone interested in 20th century Britain.