'We diagnosed the disease and its causes with microscopic exactness, but whenever we applied the healing knife a new sore appeared' Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon.

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.

This entertaining, thought-provoking and original book is a lesson in the power of ideas and language to shape popular fears in a rapidly changing world, as pertinent today as it was in the years between the wars.

Why do you describe this period of Britain's history as 'morbid'?

The title ‘Morbid Age’ is a deliberate one not only because it conjures up the image of a society contemplating its own doom, but because so many of the discourses that fed the sense of a doomed civilisation derived from the physical and medical sciences whose language was borrowed as morbid metaphor. The eugenic fears of the decline of the race, psycho-analytical anxiety about the power of unconscious forces beneath the veneer of normality, biological and psychological theory about the inevitability of war, belief that capitalism was a decaying system full of untreatable cancers, all contributed to the widespread belief that Britain faced an uncertain future and Western civilisation a potentially fatal crisis. The idea of a decaying social body, prey to all kinds of infections and disorders, was a commonplace between the wars.

In The Morbid Age you refer to many great intellectuals, did any of these have a significant influence on you when writing the book?

The book is filled with an array of intellectual giants from the inter-war years but no single one has influenced the writing of the book more than others. A small cohort have nevertheless been important in shaping the way the book is constructed – Arnold Toynbee on the fate of civilisation, J. A. Hobson on the decay of capitalism, Marie Stopes on racial decline, Ernest Jones on the psychological crisis facing civilisation, Arthur Keith (who reconstructed the skull of Piltdown Man, ancient hominid remains from Sussex later proved to be a hoax) on the inevitability of struggle between races, Arthur Ponsonby on the paradoxes of pacifism, Sidney and Beatrice Webb as model fellow-travellers of communism.

Of all the books you refer to, do you have a favourite?

Hard to have a favourite, but of all the books mentioned the one edited by Storm Jameson, Challenge to Death is a fascinating, and at times extraordinarily well-written window onto the anxieties if an age at around the mid-point of the inter-war years. James’ own conclusion, written only because she could not find what she called a ‘great name’ to do it, is a finely-written account of what made the age so anxious.

You’ve written a lot about World War II and the period leading up to it. What made you decide to write about these two decades?

The book has grown naturally out of my interest in the origins of the Second World War and the failure of much of the historical literature to engage with issues beyond international rivalry, imperialism and economic ambition. The difficult question is not why did Hitler want war, but why did British society, despite its widespread anti-war sentiment, come to accept the need for war. Before this question can be answered fully it is clearly necessary to reconstruct the public mindset and the arguments that shaped it during the inter-war years. The prevailing mentalities shaped a whole generation which came to accept that war might in the end be a solution as much as a problem.

It is possible to draw comparisons from The Morbid Age with the current economical and political situation we find ourselves in today. Do you think the ‘Western-man’ is again doomed?

It is obvious that the conclusions from The Morbid Age have echoes for the present crisis. The Western world agonises endlessly now about the future – its loss of power, the climate crisis, terrorism, a rogue nuclear strike, economic collapse. By looking at the 1920s and 1930s it is possible to see that many of these fears are distortions of reality or entirely disproportionate as they were then. More problematic perhaps is the realisation that fears of crisis can fuel possibly radical outcomes in the rise of state power, or sharper international conflict, or a war against terror that spins out of control.

What are you hoping the reader will take away from your book?

 I hope that anyone reading this book will get a fresh perspective on twenty years that we think we know very well. I also hope that the book will show just how fears of decline or crisis can be constructed and, above all, communicated in democratic societies to the point where the outcomes can appear absurd or irrational. I would like anyone reading this book to go away with a renewed scepticism about the claims of the present from political pundits, scientific experts or professional scaremongers.