British intellectual life between the wars stood at the heart of modernity. The Morbid Age opens a window on to 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. 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.