A book on Nietzsche, race and eugenics in Britain has no choice but to begin with Oscar Levy. The editor of the first complete English edition of Nietzsche's Collected Works (1909–1913), he was a Jew and a German (both withholding and juxtaposing the two will be seen to be important) who in 1894 abandoned his father's banking business in Wiesbaden for the life of the mind, settling in London as a physician. Levy not only drove forward the reception of Nietzsche in Britain in the face of widespread indifference (though on the basis of the earlier efforts of others), but also wrote much and contributed more to the intellectual development of a whole ‘school’ of thinkers, centred mainly around A. R. Orage and the avant-garde weekly journal, the New Age. His diagnoses of civilisation, penetrating and controversial, not only landed him in trouble with the authorities in the wake of the anti-alien backlash of the post-First World War period, but are still worthy of consideration for their early insights into the coming European cataclysm. Although many of his claims, stemming as they do from his belief in the need to overthrow decadent Judeo-Christian values and replace them with an aristocratic conception of society, are inimical to today's mainstream beliefs, they are consistent, compelling, and not easily dismissed.