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At Miss Whitehead’s

Edward Said, 7 July 1994

The Sixties: The Last Journal, 1960-1972 
by Edmund Wilson, edited by Lewis Dabney.
Farrar, Straus, 968 pp., $35, July 1993, 0 374 26554 2
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... trips to New York, Hungary, Paris and the Middle East. Interspersed are several sojourns on Cape Cod, where he had a summer house, and in Talcottville, the little town in upstate New York where he also had a house. Aside from numerous episodes describing the life he led with his wife Elena and various other members of his family (and ex-family like Mary ...

Phantom Jacks

John Bayley, 5 January 1989

Jack: C.S. Lewis and His Times 
by George Sayer.
Macmillan, 278 pp., £14.95, November 1988, 0 333 43362 9
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J.B. Priestley 
by Vincent Brome.
Hamish Hamilton, 512 pp., £16.95, October 1988, 9780241125601
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Eddy: The Life of Edward Sackville-West 
by Michael De-la-Noy.
Bodley Head, 341 pp., £16, October 1988, 0 370 31164 7
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... be adroit at saving the appearances. At a dinner given when he was full of years and honours, C.P. Snow made a long speech referring to him as ‘a whisper of the conscience of England’. Priestley thanked the speakers in a few words and said he hoped they would now join him in walking upon the water. His sense of himself was romantic and naive but also ...

Floating Islands

J.I.M. Stewart, 21 October 1982

Of This and Other Worlds 
by C.S. Lewis, edited by Walter Hooper.
Collins, 192 pp., £7.95, September 1982, 0 00 215608 3
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George Orwell: A Personal Memoir 
by T.R. Fyvel.
Weidenfeld, 221 pp., £9.95, September 1982, 0 297 78012 3
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... is exhibited manipulating the governing body of a college, might almost have been written by C.P. Snow, but before we are through, Merlin has returned from the dead (or something like the dead) and marvels are tumbling about our ears. It is as if Brave New World had got mixed up with Lewis’s most extended conception of fairy story. That Hideous Strength is ...

British Worthies

David Cannadine, 3 December 1981

The Directory of National Biography, 1961-1970 
edited by E.T. Williams and C.S. Nicholls.
Oxford, 1178 pp., £40, October 1981, 0 19 865207 0
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... of committees and research teams, of mandarins and boffins, as depicted in the novels of C.P. Snow (the original for at least one of whose characters is in this book) and in sundry Sampsonian Anatomies of Britain, which is commemorated in this volume. Here is an official prosopography of official Britain: civil servants write about civil ...

World’s Greatest Statesman

Edward Luttwak, 11 March 1993

Churchill: The End of Glory 
by John Charmley.
Hodder, 648 pp., £30, January 1993, 9780340487952
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Churchill: A Major New Assessment of his Life in Peace and War 
edited by Robert Blake and Wm Roger Louis.
Oxford, 517 pp., £19.95, February 1993, 0 19 820317 9
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... which stops one short right at the start by quoting one of the silliest pronouncements of C.P. Snow, that unchallenged master of pompous vacuity and sheer nonsense: WSC was ‘the last aristocrat to rule – not just preside over, rule – this country’. In Austin an even greater number of Churchillists had gathered, but not all penned contributions in ...

Madder Men

Hal Foster: Richard Hamilton on Richard Hamilton, 24 October 2019

Richard Hamilton: Introspective 
by Phillip Spectre.
König, 408 pp., £49, September 2019, 978 3 88375 695 0
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... an interrelationship between a print and a painting for which it serves as a study, or even a copy, but occasionally a subject is so firmly bound to the medium of print that it sits in isolation.’ Finally, it led to his first curatorial effort, a gathering of Joyce materials, including some of his etchings, at the new Institute of Contemporary Arts in ...

His Galactic Centrifuge

Edmund Gordon: Ballard’s Enthusiasms, 23 May 2024

Selected Non-Fiction: 1962-2007 
by J.G. Ballard, edited by Mark Blacklock.
MIT, 386 pp., £30, October 2023, 978 0 262 04832 3
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... There are several (scornful) references in this volume to the likes of Kingsley Amis and C.P. Snow, but only a single passing mention of Beckett (who had his own concept of inner space), and nothing at all about contemporaries such as Harold Pinter, Christine Brooke-Rose or B.S. Johnson. (Johnson does make a brief appearance in Miracles of Life, where ...

As the toffs began to retreat

Neal Ascherson: Declinism, 22 November 2018

What We Have Lost: The Dismantling of Great Britain 
by James Hamilton-Paterson.
Head of Zeus, 360 pp., £25, October 2018, 978 1 78497 235 6
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The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A 20th-Century History 
by David Edgerton.
Allen Lane, 681 pp., £30, June 2018, 978 1 84614 775 3
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... curiosities of British historiography: the fact that historians can’t stop writing about C.P. Snow and his ‘Two Cultures’ lecture of 1959. Sixty years have passed, and mudslides of dismissive abuse have regularly descended on Snow’s thesis. Nevertheless, his ghost refuses to shut up. His claim, roughly, was that ...

Even paranoids have enemies

Frank Kermode, 24 August 1995

F.R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism 
by Ian MacKillop.
Allen Lane, 476 pp., £25, July 1995, 0 7139 9062 7
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... of the Man of Letters, for this was trespassing on Queenie Leavis’s territory. The attack on Snow is too well known to need recall. I.A. Richards was excommunicated on the evidence of his book on Coleridge. Leavis told his students that in the course of reviewing it he had kicked the book across the room. Like Leavis’s erstwhile friend and Scrutiny ...

What’s not to like?

Stefan Collini: Ernest Gellner, 2 June 2011

Ernest Gellner: An Intellectual Biography 
by John Hall.
Verso, 400 pp., £29.99, July 2010, 978 1 84467 602 6
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... cultural antennae, as well as an indicator of an obvious affinity, that he could describe C.P. Snow’s (thin and tendentious) ‘Two Cultures’ lecture as ‘one of the most important philosophical essays to appear since the war’. He not only shared Snow’s enthusiasm for industrialism as the route to improving the ...

Gaiety

Frank Kermode, 8 June 1995

Angus Wilson 
by Margaret Drabble.
Secker, 714 pp., £20, May 1995, 0 436 20038 4
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... of money. While he was being paid £250 a year, without pension rights, at the Museum, C.P. Snow, we are told, was pulling down £750 plus perks as a young fellow of what is here described as Christ’s Church College, Cambridge (perhaps the salary was as imaginary as the college). Later, and closer to his heyday, his income compared unfavourably with ...

Quantum Influencers

Adam Mars-Jones, 7 April 2022

When We Cease to Understand the World 
by Benjamin Labatut, translated by Adrian Nathan West.
Pushkin, 192 pp., £8.99, May 2021, 978 1 78227 614 2
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... likely to be able to describe the second law of thermodynamics than they were in 1959, when C.P. Snow lamented the gap between the ‘two cultures’, but much better able to keep their ignorance hidden behind a rampart of popular science books.The title piece of the collection, which accounts for about half the book, addresses this difference of approach in ...

Being that can be understood is language

Richard Rorty: H.-G. Gadamer, 16 March 2000

... own work as a sort of apologia for the humanities. On this view of the matter, each of what C.P. Snow called ‘the two cultures’ has its own philosophical claque. Those who accept Snow’s picture of the intellectual scene think of the quarrel over science v. religion that divided the intellectuals of the 19th century ...

The Macaulay of the Welfare State

David Cannadine, 6 June 1985

The BBC: The First 50 Years 
by Asa Briggs.
Oxford, 439 pp., £17.50, May 1985, 0 19 212971 6
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The Collected Essays of Asa Briggs. Vol. I: Words, Numbers, Places, People 
Harvester, 245 pp., £30, March 1985, 0 7108 0094 0Show More
The Collected Essays of Asa Briggs. Vol. II: Images, Problems, Standpoints, Forecasts 
Harvester, 324 pp., £30, March 1985, 0 7108 0510 1Show More
The 19th Century: The Contradictions of Progress 
edited by Asa Briggs.
Thames and Hudson, 239 pp., £18, April 1985, 0 500 04013 3
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... G.D.H. Cole and the Fabians, Lord Beveridge and the LSE, Harold Macmillan and the middle way, C.P. Snow and the two cultures, Harold Wilson and white-hot technology: all these politicians and pundits whose ideas and values so pervade Briggs’s work are now yesterday’s men with yesterday’s modes. And, it is abundantly clear, Lord Briggs does not like this ...

Taylorism

Norman Stone, 22 January 1981

Politicians, Socialism and Historians 
by A.J.P. Taylor.
Hamish Hamilton, 259 pp., £12.50, October 1980, 0 241 10486 6
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A.J.P. Taylor: A Complete Annotated Bibliography 
by Chris Wrigley.
Harvester, 607 pp., £35, August 1980, 0 85527 981 8
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... their managers – Bright, Brougham, Peel (he even contrives to say some good things about C.P. Snow). He inhabits an oddly Dickensian world, in which the British Empire is represented by a Major Bagstock, the Civil Service by the Tite Barnacles, the bourgeoisle by the Veneerings, religion by the Reverend Melchisedech Howler. In his English History the only ...

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