About the Author

C. P. Snow was born in Leicester in 1905 and educated at a secondary school. He started his career as a professional scientist, though writing was always his ultimate aim. He won a research scholarship to Cambridge and became a Fellow of his college in 1930. He continued his academic life there until the beginning of the Second World War, by which time he had already begun his masterwork – the eleven-volume Strangers and Brothers sequence, two of which (The Masters and The New Men) were jointly awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1954. His other novels include The Search, The Malcontents and In Their Wisdom, the last of which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1974. Snow became a civil servant during the war and went on to become a Civil Service commissioner, for which he received a knighthood. He married a fellow novelist, Pamela Hansford Johnson, in 1950 and delivered his famous lecture, The Two Cultures, that same year. C. P. Snow died in 1980.

Reviews

The Masters stands out boldly as an achievement, lucid, compelling, ironical rather than tragic, generous in its fullness
*New Statesman*

Perhaps the most engrossing academic novel in English
*New York Times*

This book confirms the opinion that Mr Snow is one of the three or four best novelists now writing in English
*Edward Shanks*

Together, the sequence presents a vivid portrait of British academic, political and public life. Snow was that rare thing, a scientist and novelist
*Jeffrey Archer, Guardian*

Balzacian masterpieces of the age
*Philip Hensher, Telegraph*

Through [the Strangers and Brothers sequence] as in no other work in our time we have explored the inner life of the new classless class that is the 20th century Establishment
*New York Times*

A very considerable achievement . . . It brings into the novel themes and locales never seen before (except perhaps in Trollope).
*Anthony Burgess*