Like it or not, politics were everywhere and Overy devotes the closing stages of the book to an assessment of "utopian politics" (by which he means communism and fascism) and a related chapter on the Spanish Civil War and the final swing towards full-scale European hostilities.

As he rightly points out, while both fascism and communism made a feeble showing in Britain during the 1930s in terms of numbers, "the public arena was swamped with a remarkable level of engagement with both ideologies". There is a difference, however. Where Nazi Germany was overwhelmingly seen as a menace, the Soviet Union was widely thought of, even by those who didn't buy into the utopia myth, as an impressive experiment and, at least in part, an inspiration.

Overy himself certainly doesn't gloss over the nature of the Stalinist regime, but his account of its British apologists is less satisfactory. His key point is that much of what is conventionally considered fellow-travelling wasn't really politically committed. Rather, it was "a means of projecting anxieties about the prospects for British society and political institutions on to civil and political conflicts abroad". No doubt there is something in this. But the fact that many fellow-travellers were "innocent" doesn't mean that they didn't do harm. Another definition of them might be useful idiots.

Overy can also be too indulgent in his treatment of serious fellow-travellers, as opposed to the "innocent" ones. Not always: he leaves us in no doubt what he thinks of the Webbs' whitewashing of Stalin in Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation. But writing about the Left Book Club, for instance, he gives a quite inadequate idea of how far that nominally independent enterprise was dedicated to doing the communists' work for them.

His interpretation of the public response to Hitler is equally problematic. He talks of "the cultural construction of Hitler as the enemy of civilisation", and of his being "demonised as the agent of destruction". On this showing, Nazism was the occasion as much as the cause of Britain going to war in 1939. A fatalistic conviction that war was unavoidable, he argues, had taken root long before, and the country's willingness to fight, though partly prompted by Hitler's actions, was also a projection of domestic anxieties - a product of the Morbid Age.