Book review: The Morbid Age

Here are the interwar years as you might never have glimpsed them before," said Peter Preston in the Guardian. In this account of British intellectual life between 1918 and 1939, Richard Overy forgoes the stereotypes of the era - flappers, Noel Coward and Winston Churchill barely get a look in - and instead describes a society suffering from a "pandemic of paranoia".

It is a "formidably researched and elegantly written thesis" focusing on the "obsessions of an introspective artistic and philosophical elite as Britain limped from one dreadful conflict to another".

The Morbid Age, despite its depressing subject-matter, is in fact a "delight to read", said David Sexton in the London Evening Standard, thanks to Overy's detailed evocation of Britain's lively public culture: "peace demonstrators in rain-swept streets, corner shops advertising aid to war-torn Spain, crackling radios broad-casting high-minded lectures".

His thesis is that this public culture was a uniquely pessimistic one, owing to a combination of postwar "psychosis", anti-capitalist doom-mongering and Freudian despair at the irrationality of human psychology.

Even the pacifist movement (in 1934, almost a fifth of Britons opposed all military action, even as a last resort to stop an aggressor) is read by Overy as a subliminal longing for extinction. And he draws contemporary parallels, claiming that we, too, are in danger of allowing fear to distort our perception of reality. "You only have to pick up a newspaper to realise how right he is."

This "compelling" account is told with "great erudition" and "flashes of wry humour", said Juliet Gardiner in the Financial Times. "Yet it can only be part of the story." Overy focuses on a group of intellectuals - Virgina Woolf, Aldous Huxley, HG Wells, Arnold Toynbee - whose pessimism and morbidity were undeniable. But he fails to acknowledge a countervailing trend towards attempting to solve the problems of the past and plan for the problems of the future.

The 1931 National Plan for Great Britain, for instance, proposed measures to improve Britain’s political, economic, environmental and artistic outlook, such as the founding of an arts centre on London’s South Bank and the institution of a "green belt" girdling the capital.

Yet, although incomplete, The Morbid Age is still a fine work of history, said the Economist. It tells us not just what people did, but what social and intellectual factors influenced them. "With elegance and erudition, Overy opens a window into the mind of a generation."

The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars, by Richard Overy, 544p (Allen Lane, £25) The Week Bookshop £16.19 (incl p&p) ·