Name: Corridors Of Power
ISBN: 9780755118397

C.P. Snow

The corridors and committee rooms of Whitehall are the setting for the ninth in the Strangers and Brothers series. They are also home to the manipulation of political power. Roger Quaife wages his ban-the-bomb campaign from his seat in the Cabinet and his office at the Ministry.

Corridors Of Power

Edwin Lang

I have been reading C P Snow's series Strangers and Brothers for about a year. There is something in each of them that intrigues me and something in the series that keeps me captivated. I think of all I have read to date it's been his The Corridor of Power that has resonated most within me. I guess, regardless of our walk in life and our profession, political stuff happens - we're invariably immersed in it no matter how hard we might try to avoid it - in both the corporate and personal spheres of our lives. Overall there is a sense of hope in Snow's books, and especially so in Corridors of Power. I gave it a very high rating because the book seemed to possess everything that a story should have: people, their lives that aren't always on the straight and narrow, courage, villains, a sense of history (in this case England in the 1950's), anguish (I damaged a man to come to you), love, betrayal, The Organization Man, power, money: in a word - reality. So we share Eliot's life and live it along with him - in this as a senior bureaucrat in the British government in the 1950's - and we simply seem to be there with him rather than observing a life lived as even an engaged reader might. This might be a hard book for a young person to read because it lacks action and asks the reader to meander along, somewhat in the dark about what is happening, because even the narrator himself, Lewis Eliot, doesn't know. On the other hand, it is as Storm Jameson writes in Love in Winter, that whatever one's background, intelligence, experience and passions - when one is involved in politics (I suppose of any kind), then one has to be aware 'not indeed of its creed and doctrines but of the means of applying them in the long deathly serious game of parliamentary forfeits'. Edwin

Corridors Of Power

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