Author:Richard Overy
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.
'History at its best'
Economist
'The carefree image of life in Britain between the wars is overturned in this magnificent account'
Peter Preston, Observer
'It is hard to imagine anyone recording these times more exactly and more intelligently, or with greater insight and scholarship, than Overy has'
Simon Heffer, Daily Telegraph
'With learning, lucidity and wit, The Morbid Age ... brilliantly describes the sense of an inevitably approaching catastrophe'
Eric Hobsbawm, London Review of Books
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.
Wonderfully compelling ... never less than a delight to read ... supremely well informed, thoughtful and enjoyable
—— Dominic Sandbrook , Evening StandardOvery is one of the great historians of the second world war
—— Bryan Appleyard , Sunday TimesIt's difficult to do justice to the richness of Overy's account
—— Noel Malcolm , Saturday TelegraphIt is hard to imagine anyone recording these times more exactly and more intelligently, or with greater insight and scholarship, than Overy has in this book
—— Simon Heffer , Telegrapha rewarding book, and a highly readable one
—— John Gross , StandpointCompelling and thoroughly researched . . . a timely reminder of the many skeletons in Europe's cupboard
—— TLSWorth it for serious students
—— Ann Treneman , The TimesSolid and lasting...thoroughly resourced and researched
—— Anthony Howard , Sunday TelegraphA Royal Affair is an entertaining tale ...Tillyard's account of the brothers is heroic...[she] tells this astonishing tale with bravura
—— John de Falbe , Daily TelegraphShe has returned to what she knows-and does-best, teasing out the bonds of love, hate and pretend indifference that bind siblings, no matter what their historical pedigree, into a cat's cradle of consequence
—— EconomistThe story is brilliantly told. In its descriptive flourishes it is sometimes fearlessly novelistic, yet it travels long distances for scholarly scruples
—— John Mullan , Times Literary Supplement