In 1930 he became a
Fellow of Christ's College. After a
Nature paper on a new method of synthesising
Vitamin A turned out to be incorrect, he withdrew from further scientific research. Snow served in several senior civil service positions: as technical director of the
Ministry of Labour from 1940 to 1944, and as a civil service commissioner from 1945 to 1960. He was appointed a Commander of the
Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the
1943 New Year Honours. Snow was among the 2,300 names of prominent persons listed on the
Nazis'
Special Search List, of those who were to be arrested on the invasion of Great Britain and turned over to the
Gestapo. In 1944, he was appointed director of scientific personnel for the
English Electric Company. Later he became physicist-director. In this capacity he was to employ his former student
Eric Eastwood. In the
1957 New Year Honours he was
knighted, having the honour conferred by Queen
Elizabeth II on 12 February, and was created a
life peer, as
Baron Snow, of the
City of Leicester, on 29 October 1964. As a politician, Snow was
parliamentary secretary in the
House of Lords to the
Minister of Technology from 1964 to 1966 in the Labour government of
Harold Wilson. At Christ's College he tutored H. S. Hoff – later better known as the novelist
William Cooper. The two became friends, worked together in the civil service and wrote versions of each other into their novels: Snow was the model for the college dean, Robert, in Cooper's
Scenes from Provincial Life sequence. In 1960, Snow gave the
Godkin Lectures at
Harvard University, about the clashes between
Henry Tizard and F. Lindemann (later
Lord Cherwell), both scientific advisors to British governments around the time of the Second World War. The lectures were subsequently published as
Science and Government. For the academic year 1961 to 1962, Snow and his wife both served as Fellows on the faculty in the Center for Advanced Studies at
Wesleyan University.
Literary work Snow's first novel was a
whodunit,
Death under Sail (1932). In 1975 he wrote a biography of
Anthony Trollope. He is better known as the author of a sequence of novels entitled
Strangers and Brothers in which he depicts intellectuals in modern academic and government settings. The best-known of the sequence is
The Masters. It deals with the internal politics of a Cambridge college as it prepares to elect a new master. With the appeal of an insider's view, the novel depicts concerns other than the strictly academic that influence decisions of supposedly objective scholars.
The Masters and
The New Men were jointly awarded the
James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1954.
Corridors of Power added a phrase to the language of the day. In 1974, Snow's novel
In Their Wisdom was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Snow was
nominated for the
Nobel Prize in Literature multiple times in 1961, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1967, 1970 and 1971. In
The Realists, an examination of the work of eight novelists –
Stendhal,
Honoré de Balzac,
Charles Dickens,
Fyodor Dostoevsky,
Leo Tolstoy,
Benito Pérez Galdós,
Henry James and
Marcel Proust – Snow makes a robust defence of the realistic novel. The storyline of his novel
The Search is referred to in
Dorothy L. Sayers's
Gaudy Night and is used to help elicit the criminal's motive.
The Two Cultures On 7 May 1959, Snow delivered a
Rede Lecture called
The Two Cultures, which provoked "widespread and heated debate". Subsequently, published as
The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, the lecture argued that the breakdown of communication between the "two cultures" of modern society – the sciences and the humanities – was a major hindrance to solving the world's problems. In particular, Snow argues that the quality of education in the world is on the decline. He wrote: ::A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the
Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: 'Have you read a work of
Shakespeare's?' ::I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question – such as, What do you mean by
mass, or
acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, 'Can you read?' – not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their
Neolithic ancestors would have had. The satirists
Flanders and Swann used the first part of this quotation as the basis for their short monologue and song, "First and Second Law". As delivered in 1959, Snow's Rede Lectures specifically condemned the British educational system, as having since the Victorian period over-rewarded the humanities (especially
Latin and
Greek) at the expense of
science education. He believed that in practice this deprived British elites (in politics, administration, and industry) of adequate preparation for managing the modern scientific world. By contrast, Snow said, German and American schools sought to prepare their citizens equally in the sciences and humanities, and better scientific teaching enabled those countries' rulers to compete more effectively in a scientific age. Later discussion of
The Two Cultures tended to obscure Snow's initial focus on differences between British systems (of both schooling and social class) and those of competing countries. Snow was attacked by
F. R. Leavis in his Richmond Lecture of 1962 whose subject was "The Two Cultures", something that has come to be referred to as "the two cultures controversy". Although it was seen as a personal attack against Snow, Leavis maintained that he was targeting how public debates worked.
Publications {{Infobox coat of arms
Strangers and Brothers series •
George Passant (first published as
Strangers and Brothers), 1940 •
The Light and the Dark, 1947 •
Time of Hope, 1949 •
The Masters, 1951 •
The New Men, 1954 •
Homecomings, 1956 •
The Conscience of the Rich, 1958 •
The Affair, 1959 •
Corridors of Power, 1964 •
The Sleep of Reason, 1968 •
Last Things, 1970
Other fiction •
Death Under Sail, 1932 •
New Lives for Old, 1933 •
The Search, 1934 •
The Malcontents, 1972 •
In Their Wisdom, 1974, shortlisted for the
Booker Prize •
A Coat of Varnish, 1979
Non-fiction •
The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, 1959 •
Science and Government, 1961, First Four Square Edition, 1963 •
The Two Cultures and a Second Look, 1963 •
Variety of Men: Rutherford; G. H. Hardy; H. G. Wells; Einstein; Lloyd George; Churchill; Robert Frost; Dag Hammarskjöld; Stalin, 1967 •
The State of Siege, 1968 •
Public Affairs, 1971 •
Trollope: His Life and Art, 1975 •
The Realists: Portraits of Eight Novelists, 1978 (
Balzac;
Dickens;
Dostoevsky;
Galdos;
Henry James;
Proust;
Stendhal;
Tolstoy) •
The Physicists: A Generation that Changed the World, 1981 ==References==