There was much talk of a great age, an opulent “belle epoch” in the generation before World War 1. But as the English New Liberal thinker Leonard Hobhouse observed, things were different beneath the surface: “The idea of violence was in the air. There was a deliberate theory of force… it was a philosophy most appropriate to a generation that was running headlong into disaster” – the apocalypse of the trench warfare of the Western Front (rarely all quiet). One might mention cults and cultural trends such as pessimism, decadence, art-for-arts sake, modernism, nihilism and existentialist power doctrines, and Nietzsche’s “God is dead”.