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“... Laboratory, which was then headed by Lord Rutherford, the discoverer of the atomic nucleus. C.P. Snow described his job interview: Bernal had come into the room and sat down. His head was sunk into his chest ... He sat there, looking sullen ... They couldn’t get anything else out of him. Finally, in despair, Professor Hutchinson, who was in the ...”

“... Berlin – I would have put money on his place in this story, along with F.R. Leavis and C.P. Snow, who also feature sparsely. Many of the exemplary careers it does describe are full of surprises. The account of ‘Mr Facing-Both-Ways’ Eliot focuses vividly on his membership of a group called The Moot, where he crossed swords with Karl Mannheim about ...”

“... five hundred pages it aspires to the status of a grand social saga à la Margaret Drabble or C.P. Snow. Michael Jordan, sensitive and Jewish, has his first introduction to English mores at a boarding-school evacuated to the coast of North Devon. After the war he grows up to become a successful TV dramatist not unlike Raphael himself. Much of the book consists ...”

“... novels. The Cambridge dons in Pastors and Masters are distinctly unlike those conjured up by C.P. Snow; and the young Lambs, Staces, Clares and Sullivans wouldn’t readily hit it off with the Swallows, Amazons and Coots. In her novels this sort of realism has been virtually scrapped in the interest of perceptions and compulsions which are at once highly ...”

“... fanned out like so many scattered neutrons inside a nuclear device. At the end of the 1950s, C.P. Snow spoke of a clash between ‘two cultures’, between literary intellectuals and natural scientists. At the institute, von Neumann’s electronic monster brought about a clash along a different faultline: between notions of an independent scholarly life and ...”

“... did not obstruct Watson-Watt’s work on radar, as later alleged by the ill-informed C.P. Snow; what he did do was to annoy the others by sniping at the civil service (to which Watson-Watt belonged), using Churchill’s influence to resurrect matters the others thought they had disposed of, and by pushing ideas for aerial defence (e.g. aerial ...”

“... Elias repeatedly emphasises the inner confidence he gained from his early years, enabling him to cope with the war, emigration and long scholarly neglect. He joined the Signals Corps in 1915 straight from school and served on the Western Front. As with so many others, his later memory of the experience consisted only of vivid fragments – the sight of dead ...”

“... of science and an attack on ‘literary intellectuals’ by the now almost forgotten C.P. Snow; unjustly forgotten, because his ponderous novels about hope, power and prestige tell us much about the public and academic life of his period. In a sense the debate was about the 1930s, the scientists’ age of glory and the disappointed ...”

“... I wondered, not for the first time, did the ‘Frank Kermode’ we admired come into being, il capo di tutti capi in the world of reviewing and criticism for more than half a century? During another of my trudges along the forgotten caravan routes of criticism (now undertaken electronically, thanks to lockdown), I ...”

“... of continuing it in further volumes.’ ‘Projects and Options’: my notional title has a C.P. Snow-like sound, and there is something of Snow in Wain’s plain-man, matter-of-fact approach to this first large-scale volume; something of J.B. Priestley, too, to go further back, in its genial, faintly ...”

“... age. Not surprisingly, some adroit new invention is needed, and with each of them Vidal, a C.P. Snow of the Potomac, takes us further into the corridors of power. The principal innovation of Empire was Caroline Sanford, Blaise’s half-sister. Washington DC told us simply that Blaise had ‘bought a moribund newspaper, the Washington Tribune, and made it a ...”

“... to important men of affairs, living and dead, explains why Stern sometimes sounds more like C.P  Snow than Lionel Trilling. This is a book in which issues are burning, strides are huge, deaths are agonising, disputes are bitter, dreams are long cherished, feats of statesmanship are rare, commitment is unswerving, and the esteem in which people are ...”

“... now hangs on the wall of countless classrooms, and occupies textbooks, websites and T-shirts. C.P. Snow compared his first sight of it with the transformation of a wild jungle into a tranquil garden. Atkins imagines the periodic kingdom as real territory, and curiously describes the production of elements heavier than uranium during the course of the Manhattan ...”

“... Selected Verse. Reznikoff’s first visible book of poetry, it had an odd introduction by C.P. Snow, then famous as a social critic, who, ‘as far as a Gentile can judge’, found the work had ‘overtones of extraordinary unfamiliarity’. Three years later, the two publishers brought out the first volume of Testimony. In Poetry, Hayden Carruth – who ...”

“... asked the young Feynman whether he wanted milk or lemon in his tea, was told ‘Both’. C.P. Snow said of Feynman that it was as if ‘Groucho Marx was suddenly standing in for a great scientist.’ But it was not so much Groucho as Trickster, Loki or Zebedee. For all the studied naivety and scientific intuitiveness, Feynman’s supreme skills were those ...”