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Diary

M.F. Perutz: Memories of J.D.Bernal, 6 July 2000

... 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 ...

Is It Glamorous?

David Simpson: Stefan Collini among the Intellectuals, 6 March 2008

Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain 
by Stefan Collini.
Oxford, 544 pp., £16.99, July 2005, 0 19 929105 5
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... 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 ...

Mini-Whoppers

Patrick Parrinder, 7 July 1988

Forty Stories 
by Donald Barthelme.
Secker, 256 pp., £10.95, April 1988, 0 436 03424 7
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Tiny Lies 
by Kate Pullinger.
Cape, 174 pp., £9.95, April 1988, 0 224 02560 0
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Ellen Foster 
by Kaye Gibbons.
Cape, 146 pp., £9.95, May 1988, 0 224 02529 5
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After the War 
by Frederick Raphael.
Collins, 528 pp., £11.95, April 1988, 0 00 223352 5
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... 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 ...

The chair she sat on

J.I.M. Stewart, 19 July 1984

Secrets of a Woman’s Heart: The Later Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett 1920-1969 
by Hilary Spurling.
Hodder, 336 pp., £14.95, June 1984, 0 340 26241 9
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... 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 ...

Boiling Electrons

David Kaiser, 27 September 2012

Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe 
by George Dyson.
Allen Lane, 401 pp., £25, March 2012, 978 0 7139 9750 7
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... 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 ...

Momentous Conjuncture

Geoffrey Best: Dracula in Churchill’s toyshop, 18 March 2004

Prof: The Life of Frederick Lindemann 
by Adrian Fort.
Cape, 374 pp., £18.99, October 2003, 0 224 06317 0
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... 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 ...

When in Bed

David Blackbourn, 19 October 1995

Reflections on a Life 
by Norbert Elias.
Polity, 166 pp., £35, October 1994, 0 7456 1383 7
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The Civilising Process 
by Norbert Elias.
Blackwell, 558 pp., £50, March 1994, 0 631 19222 0
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... 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 ...

Era of Wonders

Eric Hobsbawm: Mandarin Science, 26 February 2009

Bomb, Book and Compass: Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China 
by Simon Winchester.
Viking, 316 pp., £20, September 2008, 978 0 670 91379 4
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... 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 ...

Early Kermode

Stefan Collini, 13 August 2020

... 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 ...

Ruined by men

Anthony Thwaite, 1 September 1988

The Truth about Lorin Jones 
by Alison Lurie.
Joseph, 294 pp., £11.95, July 1988, 0 7181 3095 2
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Latecomers 
by Anita Brookner.
Cape, 248 pp., £10.95, August 1988, 0 224 02554 6
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Where the rivers meet 
by John Wain.
Hutchinson, 563 pp., £12.95, June 1988, 9780091736170
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About the Body 
by Christopher Burns.
Secker, 193 pp., £10.95, August 1988, 0 436 09784 2
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Stories 
by Elizabeth Jolley.
Viking, 312 pp., £11.95, July 1988, 0 670 82113 6
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... 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 ...

Acapulcalypse

Patrick Parrinder, 23 November 1989

Christopher Unborn 
by Carlos Fuentes, translated by Alfred MacAdam.
Deutsch, 531 pp., £13.95, October 1989, 0 233 98016 4
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The Faber Book of Contemporary Latin American Short Stories 
edited by Nick Caistor.
Faber, 188 pp., £11.99, September 1989, 0 571 15359 3
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Hollywood 
by Gore Vidal.
Deutsch, 543 pp., £12.95, November 1989, 9780233984957
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Oldest living Confederate widow tells all 
by Allan Gurganus.
Faber, 718 pp., £12.99, November 1989, 9780571142019
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... 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 ...

Bitter as never before

David Blackbourn: Einstein, 3 February 2000

Einstein's German World 
by Fritz Stern.
Princeton, 335 pp., £15.95, October 1999, 9780691059396
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... 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 ...

Dozing at His Desk

Simon Schaffer: The Genius of the Periodic Table, 7 July 2005

A Well-Ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table 
by Michael Gordin.
Basic Books, 364 pp., $30, May 2004, 9780465027750
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... 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 ...

Poet at the Automat

Eliot Weinberger: Charles Reznikoff, 22 January 2015

... 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 ...

Milk and Lemon

Steven Shapin: The Excesses of Richard Feynman, 7 July 2005

Don’t You Have Time to Think? The Letters of Richard Feynman 
edited by Michelle Feynman.
Allen Lane, 486 pp., £20, June 2005, 0 7139 9847 4
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... 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 ...

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