Snow, C(harles) P(ercy) (1905–1980)

English novelist and physicist. He held government scientific posts in World War II and from 1964–66. His sequence of novels Strangers and Brothers (1940–70) portrayed English life from 1920 onwards. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge Rede lectures, 1959) discussed the absence of communication between literary and scientific intellectuals in the West, and added the phrase ‘the two cultures’ to the language. He was knighted in 1957 and created baron in 1964.

Snow was born in Leicester, studied physics at Cambridge, and was a fellow of Christ's College there from 1930–45. In 1945 he was appointed a civil-service commissioner, and during the 1960s he was a junior cabinet minister. He married the novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson.

His first novel was a detective story, Death under Sail (1932), followed by The Search (1934). Strangers and Brothers, the 11-volume series about the academic, public, and personal lives of the barrister Lewis Eliot, is also a medium through which Snow analyses the effects and uses of power and bureaucracy in modern English society. Other prose works include Science and Government (1961); Public Affairs (1971), a collection of essays; and Trollope (1975), a literary biography.