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“... At the time of his death in July of last year, C.P. Snow was working on this book. Its theme is the two-faced gift of physics and its applications, and of those who in not much over a generation have changed our world. Although he had completed only a first draft, his publishers have done well to let us have the book, for it is Snow at his best ...”

“... understand, in the actual neighbourhood. Yes, you’d better read that again. Not all of C.P. Snow’s sentences are as fruitlessly demanding as this pair, but quite a few of them (certainly the longer ones) do tend to move with a similarly elephantine tread. Throughout his work there is the steady thump of the single-minded plodder, the constant sense of ...”

“... briskly sets them aside, along with their author: Her death came almost a year after that of C.P. Snow, the novelist, playwright and scientist to whom she was married for 21 years [sic]. Lord Snow was 74 and died 1 July 1980. Although her fame was often linked with her husband’s, Pamela Hansford Johnson had an independent ...”

“... to convey to the reader what it is to have a well-furnished scientific mind. Some years back, C.P. Snow persuaded us that the diagnostic characteristic of such a mind is familiarity with the second law of thermodynamics. His particular choice of a scientific law was unfortunate, because it is easier to talk nonsense about the second law than almost anything ...”

“... reached the half-way stage. Already its scale and substance begin to rival the sequences of C.P. Snow and Anthony Powell. Byatt’s view of the middle class centres on the Potter family: Northern, Nonconformist, and professionally preoccupied with teaching, writing, and caring for others. The poor, in this view of England, are unthinkable except as marginal ...”

“... they vaguely knew the name but couldn’t place it – until I said she was married to C.P. Snow and then they vaguely remembered that too. They were much clearer about him: the two cultures argument, and Leavis’s vituperation, and some novels revolving around Cambridge colleges. Someone had read one of those novels long ago but couldn’t remember ...”

“... It is perhaps unkind to disturb the ashes of C. P. Snow. They have so recently been placed in the Fellows’ Garden at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he is commemorated beside John Milton. There is occasion to take a look at them, nonetheless, for we now have this account of the man by his brother, Philip Snow ...”

“... talismanic status in the public life of physics. Flanders and Swann wrote a song about it; C.P. Snow lectured on it. Whether it refers to the impossibility in a sealed system of letting heat flow from a cooler to a hotter body, or to the tendency of the universe to run down to more chaotic and disorderly states, it forms a key element in the magnificent ...”

“... of his nature that are implicitly revealed. But Powell’s friends serve mainly as a source of ‘copy’: wandering through this gallery of eccentrics, it is more apparent what he saw in them than what they saw in him. He offers some shrewd comments on how a friend might be transformed, or absorbed, into a novelistic character: but he withholds the crucial ...”

“... interested in whether Simon Raven was related to Canon Charles Raven. The character Jago in C.P. Snow’s novel sequence is said to be based on the late Canon, and I found that my ideas of Jago and the real Canon Raven were almost inextricably mixed: this made me recognise that I would find it impossible to ask James Prior about ‘Peter Morrison MP’ and ...”

“... of a standard far beneath the average Russian’s. Why should Soviet readers have C.P. Snow and Sillitoe in good Russian versions when we are so far from a definitive ...”

“... projects to augment British industry, global trade and imperial power.Sen doesn’t mention C.P. Snow, but he does echo the warnings Snow made in his ‘two cultures’ lecture, delivered in 1959 during the Sputnik era, when the Doomsday Clock was set at two minutes to midnight. British intellectual culture was, he ...”

“... often the occasion of new sequences of paintings. He became a popular provider of book jackets (C.P  Snow and Patrick White, for example), and of stage sets for ballet and opera. The Queen bought his pictures, and he was knighted and awarded the OM. Kenneth Clark wrote an introduction to a monograph on Nolan’s work, and Nolan went to Sweden to accept ...”

“... of the great stabilising aspects of the English-speaking peoples, the ‘two cultures’ that C.P. Snow so deplored. Locke is honoured for his pleas for toleration in religion, but he knows the danger of dogma in all things. By all means know the Second Law of Thermodynamics (I imagine him retorting to Snow): ‘that is very ...”

“... not enjoy a successful business career’. But when he left his commuter train he gave his copy of the Times to the engine driver. Perhaps this was a gesture common among gentlemen, but it seems unlikely, for the driver’s cab would be full of newspapers. Still, it is a rather fine thing to have done. One learns a lot about upper-class behaviour from ...”