That a generalised sense of crisis played its part in the build-up to war would be hard to deny. But in placing such heavy emphasis on it, Overy underestimates the public's sense of reality. Most people accepted the need for war because they saw Hitler as an objective threat, and a threat that would only grow worse the longer he went unchecked. Overy's exaggeration in this case makes you wonder whether there isn't a vein of exaggeration running throughout The Morbid Age. Certainly "morbid" seems too highly coloured an adjective to sum up an entire epoch. And that in turn makes you suspect that the book may well have a buried message.

If it does, it can only be that we too, in our own time, would do well to take things more calmly. Overy closes the book with a warning that democracies today are no more immune than they were in the past from "the dangerous power of popular fear". And at an earlier point he suggests that we are in an even more jittery state than our Morbid Age predecessors. "The inter-war years," he writes, "differed from the current malaise in the sense that many of the issues confronted by the West were neither phantoms nor extrapolated fantasies but the fruit of real historical dramas."

As to what specific phantoms and fantasies he has in mind, we can only guess. He doesn't offer any further clues. The Morbid Age is a rewarding book (and a highly readable one), but there remains something unexplained at the heart of it.