The great debate about ‘The Two Cultures’ divided the arts and sciences in Cambridge, and the intellectual pages of Britain, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but is now hardly remembered, memorialised only in Stefan Collini’s edition of the 1959 Rede Lecture. This lecture was a claim for the centrality 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 poets’ low, dishonest or otherwise depreciable decade. In a narrower sense it represented a rearguard local engagement between arts intellectuals and Cambridge’s self-confident natural scientists, well on the way to their 83 Nobel prizes, who knew that the future greatness (and funding) of the university would essentially be in their hands. Probably nothing irritated arts dons more than the scientists’ certainty that the future was theirs. In a wider sense, it was about the relation between reason and imagination. In Snow’s view the scientists had both, and the literary intellectuals were fatally hobbled by their ignorance and suspicion of science and the future. Only one of the two cultures really counted.

Snow overplayed his hand, though not as absurdly as his chief antagonist, F.R. Leavis, but fundamentally he was right. In the first half of the 20th century, the canyon between the two cultures was probably wider than it had ever been, at least in Britain, where secondary schools divided ‘arts’ from ‘science’ when children were in their mid-teens. In fact, arts intellectuals were cut off from the sciences, but scientists weren’t cut off from the arts, since the basic education for the upper social strata had always been one of letters, and the then small community of scientists came chiefly from this milieu.

Nevertheless, the contrast is striking between the range of knowledge and interests of a group of interwar scientists – mostly, but not exclusively, with biological interests – and the limitations of those in the arts. The leading group of 1930s poets, other perhaps than Empson, admired technology (all those pylons in poems), but, unlike the Romantics, seem to have had no sense of living in an era of scientific wonders. Shelley and Keats, J.B.S. Haldane observed, were the last poets to be abreast of developments in chemistry. Conversely, scientists could lecture on Iranian art (Bernal), write books about Blake (Bronowski), acquire honorary degrees in music (C.H. Waddington), investigate comparative religion (Haldane) and – above all – have a sense of history.

They also tended to combine the imaginations of art and science with endless energy, free love, eccentricity and revolutionary politics. It is a combination highly characteristic of the era between the world wars, or more specifically of the 1930s. No one more obviously belonged to it than Joseph Needham (Li Yuese in Mandarin), who was perhaps the most interesting mind among the constellation of brilliant ‘red’ scientists of that decade, and perhaps the most unusual in his ability to combine revolutionary behaviour and convictions with acceptance by the established world of Who’s Who, eventually as master of his Cambridge college and Companion of Honour. Not everyone in the Cold War years would have survived having – wrongly – accused the US of using bacteriological weapons in the Korean War.