In the years following World War II the health and well-being of the nation was of primary concern to the British government. The essays in this collection examine the relationship between health and stress in post-war Britain through a series of carefully connected case studies.

This book was first published in 1981.

John Maynard Keynes, then a rising young economist, participated in the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 as chief representative of the British Treasury and advisor to Prime Minister David Lloyd George. He resigned after desperately trying and failing to reduce the huge demands for reparations being made on Germany. The Economic Consequences of the Peace is Keynes' brilliant and prophetic analysis of the effects that the peace treaty would have both on Germany and, even more fatefully, the world.

A major re-interpretation of international relations in the period from 1919 to 1939. Avoiding such simplistic explanations as appeasement and British decline, Keith Neilson demonstrates that the underlying cause of the Second World War was the intellectual failure to find an effective means of maintaining the new world order created in 1919. With secret diplomacy, alliances and the balance of power seen as having caused the First World War, the makers of British policy after 1919 were forced to rely on such instruments of liberal internationalism as arms control, the League of Nations and global public opinion to preserve peace. Using Britain's relations with Soviet Russia as a focus for a re-examination of Britain's dealings with Germany and Japan, this book shows that these tools were inadequate to deal with the physical and ideological threats posed by Bolshevism, fascism, Nazism and Japanese militarism.

A Familiar Compound Ghost explores the relationship between allusion and the uncanny in literature. An unexpected echo or quotation in a new text can be compared to the sudden appearance of a ghost or mysterious double, the reanimation of a corpse, or the discovery of an ancient ruin hidden in a modern city. In this scholarly and suggestive study, Brown identifies moments where this affinity between allusion and the uncanny is used by writers to generate a particular textual charge, where uncanny elements are used to flag patterns of allusion and to point to the haunting presence of an earlier work. A Familiar Compound Ghost traces the subtle patterns of connection between texts centuries, even millennia apart, from Greek tragedy and Latin epic, through the plays of Shakespeare and the Victorian novel, to contemporary film, fiction and poetry. Each chapter takes a different uncanny motif as its focus: doubles, ruins, reanimation, ghosts and journeys to the underworld.