kev67
02-01-2015, 04:21 PM
Any opinions on this author?
I knew my mother had read him, so I asked her what she thought of him. She said he was one of her favourite authors, along with Jane Austen, Graeme Green and D. H. Lawrence. That is exalted company. He wrote a series of books entitled Strangers and Brothers, which I gather may be read out of sequence or as stand-alone books. The plots revolve around the machinations of elite British institutions from the 30s, 40s and 50s. He was popular in his time, but is now hardly read. Snow was an unusual, because he started out as a scientist before becoming an author.
These days he still seems more famous about a lecture he gave called The Two Cultures, criticizing the divide between science and the humanities at the universities, and a big row that ensued when F. R. Leavis responded to it. F. R. Leavis was a literary critic and a Cambridge don, so it was a surprise when he made such a savage attack on Snow, not so much responding to the issues that Snow brought up, but calling him a rubbish writer, and implying he had been a rubbish scientist too.
I knew my mother had read him, so I asked her what she thought of him. She said he was one of her favourite authors, along with Jane Austen, Graeme Green and D. H. Lawrence. That is exalted company. He wrote a series of books entitled Strangers and Brothers, which I gather may be read out of sequence or as stand-alone books. The plots revolve around the machinations of elite British institutions from the 30s, 40s and 50s. He was popular in his time, but is now hardly read. Snow was an unusual, because he started out as a scientist before becoming an author.
These days he still seems more famous about a lecture he gave called The Two Cultures, criticizing the divide between science and the humanities at the universities, and a big row that ensued when F. R. Leavis responded to it. F. R. Leavis was a literary critic and a Cambridge don, so it was a surprise when he made such a savage attack on Snow, not so much responding to the issues that Snow brought up, but calling him a rubbish writer, and implying he had been a rubbish scientist too.