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Today we pride ourselves on the belief that the Second World War was fought out of moral revulsion at the ideas embodied by the Nazis. But as Jonathan Freedland reveals in his new novel – Pantheon, written under the pseudonym Sam Bourne – the truth is not so neat. Intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic were deeply in thrall to a set of principles we would now regard as horribly close to Nazism.

The idea in question is eugenics – the belief that society should encourage the strongest and brightest to breed, while pushing, or even forcing, those deemed inferior to produce fewer children or none at all. In some, that fed dreams of a new breed of supermen, a pantheon of almost godlike men and women. In others, it meant dangerous – and lethal – schemes to weed out those branded unfit for life.

Freedland will name and shame the surprising figures who signed up for this now discredited creed and reveal the true events – including a wartime episode centred on Oxford – that inspired Pantheon. He talks to Ross King, a novelist and art historian whose books include Brunelleschi’s Dome and Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling.