C.P. Snow

Charles Percy Snow, Baron Snow, was an English novelist, scientist and civil servant. He is best known for his series of novels, Strangers and Brothers, and his 1959 lecture, The Two Cultures, which explored the divide between the sciences and the humanities.

Charles Percy Snow was born in Leicester, England, and was the second of four sons of William Snow, a church organist and choirmaster, and Ada Snow. He attended Alderman Newton's School, where he excelled academically. In 1925, Charles began studying science at University College, Leicester and graduated with a first-class degree in chemistry in 1927. He continued his education at Christ's College, Cambridge, where he earned a physics doctorate in 1930. His research focused on the infrared spectra of diatomic molecules.

After completing his doctorate, Snow was elected a Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge. However, his early scientific work suffered setbacks, including an erroneous Nature paper on vitamin A synthesis, which led him to abandon active research. He shifted his focus to administration and literature while maintaining an interest in science and public policy.

During the Second World War, Snow served in the British Civil Service as Technical Director in the Ministry of Labour (1940–1944) and later as Civil Service Commissioner (1945–1960). He played a key role in scientific personnel management and was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1943.

He also worked in industry as the Director of scientific personnel at English Electric from 1944. In recognition of his services, he was knighted in 1957 and created a life peer as Baron Snow of the City of Leicester in 1964. From 1964 to 1966, he was parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Technology in Harold Wilson's Labour government.

Snow's literary career began with publishing the detective novel Death Under Sail (1932). He gained wider recognition with Strangers and Brothers, a series of eleven books that explored power and ambition in academic and political settings.

The Masters (1951), one of the best-known novels in the series, portrays the internal politics of a Cambridge college. The New Men (1954) and Corridors of Power (1964) explore scientific and political themes. The series won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1954. His later novel In Their Wisdom (1974) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

In 1959, Snow delivered The Two Cultures lecture, arguing that the division between scientific and literary intellectuals was holding progress back. He wrote, "Once or twice, provoked, I asked the company how many of them could describe the second law of thermodynamics. The answer was cold: it was also negative."

The lecture sparked debate, particularly in Britain, where he criticised an education system that overemphasised the humanities at the expense of science.

Snow also wrote nonfiction books, such as Science and Government (1961), which examined scientific advisers in wartime Britain, and The Realists (1978), a study of eight novelists, including Dickens, Dostoyevsky, and Proust. In 1975, he published a biography of Anthony Trollope.

In 1950, Snow married the novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson. They had one son. Snow was friends with the mathematician G. H. Hardy, the physicist J. D. Bernal, and the cultural historian Jacques Barzun.

Snow continued to write until the end of his life. His last novel, A Coat of Varnish, was published in 1979. C.P. Snow died in 1980.