Background
Snow was born on October 15, 1905, in Leicester, England, the son of William Snow, a church organist and choirmaster, and his wife Ada. Charles was the second of four boys, his brothers being Harold, Eric and Philip Snow.
( It is the onset of World War II in the fifth in the Str...)
It is the onset of World War II in the fifth in the Strangers and Brothers series. A group of Cambridge scientists are working on atomic fission. But there are consequences for the men who are affected by it. Hiroshima also causes mixed personal reactions.
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(2013 Reprint of 1959 Edition. Exact facsimile of the orig...)
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."
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(The penultimate novel in the 'Strangers and Brothers' ser...)
The penultimate novel in the 'Strangers and Brothers' series takes Goya's theme of monsters that appear in our sleep. The sleep of reason here is embodied in the ghastly murders of children that involve torture and sadism.
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(The corridors and committee rooms of Whitehall are the se...)
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. The stakes are high as he employs his persuasiveness.
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(Economic storm clouds gather as bad political weather is ...)
Economic storm clouds gather as bad political weather is forecast for the nation. Three elderly peers look on from the sidelines of the House of Lords and wonder if it will mean the end of a certain way of life. Against this background is set a court struggle over a disputed will that escalates into an almighty battle.
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( The fourth in the Strangers and Brothers series begins ...)
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.
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( In the first of the Strangers and Brothers series, Lewi...)
In the first of the Strangers and Brothers series, Lewis Eliot tells the story of George Passant, a Midland solicitors managing clerk and idealist who tries to bring freedom to a group of people in the years 1925 to 1933.
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novelist Physical chemist scientist
Snow was born on October 15, 1905, in Leicester, England, the son of William Snow, a church organist and choirmaster, and his wife Ada. Charles was the second of four boys, his brothers being Harold, Eric and Philip Snow.
Scholarships permitted Snow to attend Leicester’s University College, where he took first-class honors in chemistry (1927) and an M. Sc. in physics (1928); another scholarship took him as a research student to Christ’s College, Cambridge, from which he secured a fellowship in 1930, the same year he obtained his Ph. D.
After 1935, with his career as research physicist over and that of novelist conclusively under way, Snow's college duties consisted of tutoring, administration, and service to the university’s press as editor of the Cambridge Library of Modern Science and, from 1937 until 1940, the popular science magazine.
During World War II, Snow was a member of the Royal Society Advisory Subcommittee on Deployment of Scientific Resources (1939-1942), becoming, upon absorption of this committee by the Ministry of Labour, the ministry’s director of technical personnel.
Snow served as director (later physicist-director) of scientific personnel for the English Electric Company (1944-1964). Snow’s brief career as a research physicist was devoted mainly to extensions of his doctoral work on the infrared spectra of simple diatomic molecules and to crystallographic studies of complex organic molecules. The realization of his scheme, the eleven-volume Strangers and Brothers, absorbed him for thirty years (1940-1970).
In pronouncement and practice Snow was resolutely antimodernist, regarding the literary mainstream’s experimentation and its concentration on the self as intellectually impoverished and perniciously antisocial. His intimate familiarity with the officialdoms of science, universities, and government was his stock in trade, while his unadorned prose, attention to plot, concern with the motives and moral dilemmas of the powerful, and preference for the large canvas made him, as the critic Melvin Mad-docks observed, “the greatest living nineteenth-century novelist. ” It was not as a novelist, however, but as a besieged publicist for the increasing importance of science in human life and as a pundit concerned with global problems of poverty, nuclear weapons, and the menacing collapse of Western civilization, that Snow became a major public figure with an international reputation.
Enormous attention, much of it irritated, was paid Snow's Rede Lectures, delivered at Cambridge in 1959 and published as The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1960). His case for science as an intrinsically moral activity, for technology as the answer to mankind’s most pressing problems, and against the “natural Luddism” of traditional culture’s leading exponents seemed to many a crass simplification. The ensuing debate between partisans was one of the liveliest and most acerbic in the history of English literature, serving, as had the contest between the ancients and the moderns in the seventeenth century, to bring into the open, though not to bridge, the divide of suspicion and mistrust between literary and scientific intellectuals.
Snow’s Godkin Lectures at Harvard in 1960, published under the title Science and Government (1961), used the clashes between Henry Tizard and Churchill’s science adviser F. A. Lindemann during World War II over the viability of radar and strategic bombing to bring to the public’s attention “the great underground domain of science and government. ”
( In the first of the Strangers and Brothers series, Lewi...)
(The penultimate novel in the 'Strangers and Brothers' ser...)
(The corridors and committee rooms of Whitehall are the se...)
( The fourth in the Strangers and Brothers series begins ...)
( It is the onset of World War II in the fifth in the Str...)
(Economic storm clouds gather as bad political weather is ...)
(2013 Reprint of 1959 Edition. Exact facsimile of the orig...)
Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (1951), honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1962), honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1962), fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge (1966)
Snow married the novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson in 1950; they had one son.