Overy - The morbid age: Britain between the wars

In his recent memoirs, the historian Eric Hobsbawm remarked of the 1930s that we lived in a time of crisis. Nothing very surprising about that. But I recall a conversation with him a few years ago, shortly before starting the research for this book, when he told me that he could remember a day in Cambridge in early 1939 when he and some friends discussed their sudden realization that very soon they might all of them be dead. This did strike me as surprising, and it runs against the drift of the memoirs, in which he argued that communists were less infected by pessimism than everyone else because of their confidence in the future. It is also very different from my own memories of life in Cambridge thirty years later in the late 1960s where, despite labouring under the shadow of the bomb and the threat of war in Europe during the second Czech crisis, students did not contemplate early extinction but preferred to listen to Leonard Cohen in rooms made mellow by too much smoke and cheap wine.

This book is an exploration of British society in the 1920s and 1930s while it wrestled sometimes fatalistically, sometimes with undisguised relish, with this idea of crisis. The result is, I hope, an unexpected and unusual window on to the social, cultural and intellectual world of inter-war Britain. In some small way it may explain why students in the secure Cambridge of the late 1930s could contemplate the death of civilization in a country whose political and social system had proved almost impervious to the savage violence and upheavals that scarred the history of the rest of Europe, and from which Hobsbawm himself was an exile. This was not just a time of crisis, but indeed a morbid age.

During the writing of the book I have amassed a large pile of intellectual and practical debts. I am very grateful to Monika Baar, Claudia Baldoli, Kate Fisher, Tim Rees, Richard Toye and Frances Wilson for reading parts of the manuscript and offering me sound advice. The following have been helpful in a variety of ways: Jeremy Black, Jane Caplan, Chris Clarke, Patricia Clavin, Claire Feehily, Lara Feigel, Eileen Gunn, Tom Hoy, Jonathan Moffatt, Martin Thomas, Andrew Thorpe, Alex Walsham. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Vyvyan and Piers Brendon, who were kind enough to put me up, often at a few days notice, for all my archive trips to Cambridge. I am grateful to the Penguin Group for permission to use the Allen Lane archive at Bristol University and to Jean Rose for permission to quote from the files of Jonathan Cape in the Reading University Special Collections. I would also like to thank Verity Andrews and Brian Ryder for help in locating material in the Cape collection and the Allen & Unwin papers. Eva Guggemos gave me assistance with the Lawrence and Wishart papers at Yale. I am glad to be able to thank Elizabeth al-Qadhi for allowing me to use the papers of her father, John Strachey. I am also grateful to Faber and Faber for permission to quote from the work of T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden. I would like to thank the archivists and librarians in all the many places I have visited over the past two years while researching the book, but I would like in particular to acknowledge the staff at the LSE Archive for their unfailing courtesy and helpfulness. My new academic home at the University of Exeter has been a keen supporter of this project and I would like to record my thanks for the financial assistance which has made much of this research possible and for the helpfulness and advice of my colleagues. Simon Winder has been as ever an inestimable editor, and my agent Gill Coleridge a true friend and supporter, and I am conscious of the large debt I owe them both. My new editor in New York, Wendy Wolf, has rightly asked me to make the Englishness of the text more accessible and has made it a better book as a result. A final thanks to my family for their persistent interest in and enthusiasm for what I do.

Richard Overy
September 2008