# The Morbid Age

Canonical: https://www.bookquiver.com/richard-overy/the-morbid-age/9780141003252

![The Morbid Age](https://quivercdn.com/covers/penguin/richard-overy/the-morbid-age_978-01-4100-325-2.jpg?v=2026-04-23%2007%3A09%3A25)

- Book: [The Morbid Age](https://www.bookquiver.com/richard-overy/the-morbid-age) ([The Morbid Age.md](https://www.bookquiver.com/richard-overy/the-morbid-age.md))
- Authors: [Richard Overy](https://www.bookquiver.com/richard-overy)
- Publisher: Penguin
- ISBN: 978-01-4100-325-2
- Pages: 544
- Published: 2010-05-27
- Language: en_GB
- Binding: Softcover

## Description

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.