C. P. Snow

Analyzes the problems and consequences of the lack of communication between scientists and non-scientists in the modern world

The Two Cultures

The fourth in the Strangers and Brothers series begins with the dying Master of a Cambridge college. His imminent demise causes intense rivalry and jealousy amongst the other fellows. Former friends become enemies as the election looms.

The Masters

G. H. Hardy

G. H. Hardy was one of this century's finest mathematical thinkers, renowned among his contemporaries as a 'real mathematician ... the purest of the pure'. He was also, as C. P. Snow recounts in his Foreword, 'unorthodox, eccentric, radical, ready to talk about anything'. This 'apology', written in 1940, offers a brilliant and engaging account of mathematics as very much more than a science; when it was first published, Graham Greene hailed it alongside Henry James's notebooks as 'the best account of what it was like to be a creative artist'. C. P. Snow's Foreword gives sympathetic and witty insights into Hardy's life, with its rich store of anecdotes concerning his collaboration with the brilliant Indian mathematician Ramanujan, his idiosyncrasies, and his passion for cricket. This is a unique account of the fascination of mathematics and of one of its most compelling exponents in modern times.

A Mathematician's Apology

2013 Reprint of 1959 Edition. Exact facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. This is the publication of the influential 1959 Rede Lecture by British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow. Its thesis was that "the intellectual life of the whole of western society" was split into the titular two cultures - namely the sciences and the humanities - and that this was a major hindrance to solving the world's problems. Published in book form, Snow's lecture was widely read and discussed on both sides of the Atlantic, leading him to write a 1963 follow-up, "The Two Cultures: And a Second Look: An Expanded Version of The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution."

The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution

Time of Hope (Strangers and Brothers)

Stefan Collini

The importance of science and technology and future of education and research are just some of the subjects discussed here.

The life of Lewis Eliot – documented across eleven novels with C. P. Snow’s distinctive blend of precision and compassion – begins in Time of Hope. The novel opens in the summer of 1914 when nine-year-old Lewis hears the news of his father’s bankruptcy, and closes in 1933, when, although hindered in his promising career as a lawyer by the neuroses of his wife, he realises that he cannot bear to leave her. In the course of this ambitious but ultimately unremarkable man’s early life rage the great questions of the age – questions of class, of gender, of ideology and of war – asked and answered with wisdom and tolerance. A meticulous study of the public issues and private problems of post-war Britain, C. P. Snow’s Strangers and Brothers sequence is a towering achievement that stands alongside Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time as one of the great romans-fleuves of the twentieth century.

Time of Hope

Variety of Men

The Moral Un-Neutrality of Science

In the eighth in the Strangers and Brothersseries Donald Howard, a young science Fellow is charged with scientific fraud and dismissed from his college. This novel, which became a successful West End play, describes a miscarriage of justice in the same Cambridge college which served as a setting for The Masters.

The Affair

Horacio Pons

Las dos culturas

The stability and resilience of Lewis Eliot is sharply contrasted with the melancholia of his brilliant colleague, Roy Calvert, in the fourth novel of C. P. Snow’s masterful Strangers and Brothers sequence. Opening in Cambridge in 1935 and ending in London in 1943, all of Roy’s brief and dazzling academic career is narrated in this powerful study of manic depression. A charming iconoclast, he shakes the staid foundations of the university with his mischievous disregard for authority, his outbursts against elders who are not betters, and his reckless pursuit of women. But his buoyant joie de vivre masks a terrible illness, and fatalism and growing despair push him into a flirtation with Nazism, and on to a terrible path to tragedy. Perhaps the most moving of Snow’s novels, The Light and the Dark is a deeply felt account of a complicated man’s search for greater meaning in the turbulent, and often senseless, years preceding the Second World War. A meticulous study of the public issues and private problems of post-war Britain, C. P. Snow’s Strangers and Brothers sequence is a towering achievement that stands alongside Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time as one of the great romans-fleuves of the twentieth century. Praise for the Strangers and Brothers sequence “Together, the sequence presents a vivid portrait of British academic, political and public life. Snow was that rare thing, a scientist and novelist.” Jeffrey Archer, Guardian “Balzacian masterpieces of the age” Philip Hensher, Telegraph “Through [the Strangers and Brothers sequence] as in no other work in our time we have explored the inner life of the new classless class that is the 20th century Establishment” New York Times “A very considerable achievement ... It brings into the novel themes and locales never seen before (except perhaps in Trollope).” Anthony Burgess

The Light and the Dark

This story told in the first person starts with a child’s interest in the night sky. A telescope starts a lifetime’s interest in science. The narrator goes up to King’s College, London to study. As a fellow at Cambridge he embarks on love affairs and searches for love at the same time as career success. Finally, contentment in love exhausts his passion for research.

C. P. Snow

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