The English novelist and physicist Charles Percy Snow (1905-1972) wrote "Strangers and Brothers," a series of novels depicting the professional and intellectual classes and detailing the struggles involved in the pursuit of ambition and the exercise of...

C. P. Snow's place in twentieth-century letters is unusual; no other major writer in any creative literary genre established himself also in science and in the high ranks of governmental and public service. And in an age in which most leading literary...

C. P. Snow's place in twentieth-century letters is unique: no other major writer in any creative literary genre established himself also in science and in the high ranks of governmental and public service. And in an age in which most leading literary...

In his 1959 lecture, "The Two Cultures," C. P. Snow declared that Western intellectuals were "split into two polar groups," literary and scientific, parted by "a gulf of mutual incomprehension." Scientists knew little literature or history; literary people, little science. Many great writers (Ruskin,...

Heavy of jowl, shambling of gait, ponderous of voice, his manner was still affable. C. P. Snow had a kindly, avuncular air. But the air of an impressive uncle. You felt its weight. By the time I first knew him, when he was in...

The world is a scrim, left blank for the tints and whorls of the ego. Void an object of its quantum of human aspiration, and you might as well annihilate it. I think, therefore I am. Fine, but even better: I desire, therefore you, he,...

[Future] social historians may find a lot to interest them in Snow's novels. But no literary work can be justified by its subject matter alone, though Snow's admirers sometimes seem to imply that he is such a good novelist simply because he writes about so many different aspects of our society…. Inevitably an author must be judged not merely on the variety of his materials, but on what he makes of it. (p. 215) One of my initial difficulties in reading Snow at all is in coming to terms w...

[Not] only is [Sir Charles Snow] not a genius; he is intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be. If that were all, and Snow were merely negligible, there would be no need to say so in any insistent public way, and one wouldn't choose to do it…. Snow is a portent. He is a portent in that, being in himself negligible, he has become for a vast public on both sides of the Atlantic a master-mind and a sage. His significance is that he has been accepted—or perhaps the point is ...

Snow's very success in dealing with the moral and political experience of our time has diverted attention from his artistic achievement. Even his admirers have helped to crystallize the view of Snow as an intelligent and thoughtful commentator, and examinations of his fiction have tended to dwell upon his large attitudes and his sense of character. The recurring comparisons to Trollope reinforce the image of a plain novelist with unusual gifts of psychological penetration, discrimination, and toleran...