“... which stops one short right at the start by quoting one of the silliest pronouncements of C.P. Snow, that unchallenged master of pompous vacuity and sheer nonsense: WSC was ‘the last aristocrat to rule – not just preside over, rule – this country’. In Austin an even greater number of Churchillists had gathered, but not all penned contributions in ...”

“... be adroit at saving the appearances. At a dinner given when he was full of years and honours, C.P. Snow made a long speech referring to him as ‘a whisper of the conscience of England’. Priestley thanked the speakers in a few words and said he hoped they would now join him in walking upon the water. His sense of himself was romantic and naive but also ...”

“... trips to New York, Hungary, Paris and the Middle East. Interspersed are several sojourns on Cape Cod, where he had a summer house, and in Talcottville, the little town in upstate New York where he also had a house. Aside from numerous episodes describing the life he led with his wife Elena and various other members of his family (and ex-family like Mary ...”

“... of committees and research teams, of mandarins and boffins, as depicted in the novels of C.P. Snow (the original for at least one of whose characters is in this book) and in sundry Sampsonian Anatomies of Britain, which is commemorated in this volume. Here is an official prosopography of official Britain: civil servants write about civil ...”

“... an interrelationship between a print and a painting for which it serves as a study, or even a copy, but occasionally a subject is so firmly bound to the medium of print that it sits in isolation.’ Finally, it led to his first curatorial effort, a gathering of Joyce materials, including some of his etchings, at the new Institute of Contemporary Arts in ...”

“... There are several (scornful) references in this volume to the likes of Kingsley Amis and C.P. Snow, but only a single passing mention of Beckett (who had his own concept of inner space), and nothing at all about contemporaries such as Harold Pinter, Christine Brooke-Rose or B.S. Johnson. (Johnson does make a brief appearance in Miracles of Life, where ...”

“... is exhibited manipulating the governing body of a college, might almost have been written by C.P. Snow, but before we are through, Merlin has returned from the dead (or something like the dead) and marvels are tumbling about our ears. It is as if Brave New World had got mixed up with Lewis’s most extended conception of fairy story. That Hideous Strength is ...”

“... curiosities of British historiography: the fact that historians can’t stop writing about C.P. Snow and his ‘Two Cultures’ lecture of 1959. Sixty years have passed, and mudslides of dismissive abuse have regularly descended on Snow’s thesis. Nevertheless, his ghost refuses to shut up. His claim, roughly, was that ...”

“... of the Man of Letters, for this was trespassing on Queenie Leavis’s territory. The attack on Snow is too well known to need recall. I.A. Richards was excommunicated on the evidence of his book on Coleridge. Leavis told his students that in the course of reviewing it he had kicked the book across the room. Like Leavis’s erstwhile friend and Scrutiny ...”

“... cultural antennae, as well as an indicator of an obvious affinity, that he could describe C.P. Snow’s (thin and tendentious) ‘Two Cultures’ lecture as ‘one of the most important philosophical essays to appear since the war’. He not only shared Snow’s enthusiasm for industrialism as the route to improving the ...”

“... of money. While he was being paid £250 a year, without pension rights, at the Museum, C.P. Snow, we are told, was pulling down £750 plus perks as a young fellow of what is here described as Christ’s Church College, Cambridge (perhaps the salary was as imaginary as the college). Later, and closer to his heyday, his income compared unfavourably with ...”

“... likely to be able to describe the second law of thermodynamics than they were in 1959, when C.P. Snow lamented the gap between the ‘two cultures’, but much better able to keep their ignorance hidden behind a rampart of popular science books.The title piece of the collection, which accounts for about half the book, addresses this difference of approach in ...”

“... accepted an offer to return to Oxford as provost of Worcester College. ‘It does seem like a cop-out to the port and nuts,’ a colleague wrote. ‘After all, he has told me on countless occasions, after visits to Oxford and Cambridge, that he could never go back to such snobbish, over-privileged places.’ In the same year, he accepted a life peerage ...”

“... G.D.H. Cole and the Fabians, Lord Beveridge and the LSE, Harold Macmillan and the middle way, C.P. Snow and the two cultures, Harold Wilson and white-hot technology: all these politicians and pundits whose ideas and values so pervade Briggs’s work are now yesterday’s men with yesterday’s modes. And, it is abundantly clear, Lord Briggs does not like this ...”

“... their managers – Bright, Brougham, Peel (he even contrives to say some good things about C.P. Snow). He inhabits an oddly Dickensian world, in which the British Empire is represented by a Major Bagstock, the Civil Service by the Tite Barnacles, the bourgeoisle by the Veneerings, religion by the Reverend Melchisedech Howler. In his English History the only ...”