English physicist, civil servant, novelist, and public intellectual remembered now almost entirely for a single lecture — "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution," delivered as the Rede Lecture at Cambridge in May 1959 — and for the spectacular academic row it touched off with F.R. Leavis three years later. Charles Percy Snow was born in Leicester to lower-middle-class parents, took a Cambridge Ph.D. in molecular physics in the late 1920s, became a college fellow, and during the Second World War moved into the civil service as a recruiter of scientists for the war effort. He spent the rest of his working life moving comfortably between Whitehall, fiction, and the lecture circuit; he was knighted in 1957, made a life peer (Baron Snow of Leicester) in 1964, and briefly served as Parliamentary Secretary in the first Wilson government.
The "two cultures" thesis, as delivered at Cambridge, was short and to the point: the educated classes of the West had split into two mutually incomprehensible camps, the literary intellectuals and the natural scientists, and the literary side — which staffed the civil service, ran the universities, and did most of the writing about culture — was smugly ignorant of physics, biology, and the second law of thermodynamics, while sneering at the engineers and researchers who were actually lifting the majority of humankind out of subsistence poverty. Snow's solution was educational reform and a scientific education taken seriously by elites; his political subtext was that the poor countries of the world would be fed by industry, not by literary lamentation. Attacked by Snow as "natural Luddites," F.R. Leavis responded three years later with the 1962 Richmond Lecture — one of the more vituperative performances in English academic prose — arguing that Snow was "portentously ignorant," that his novels were unreadable, and that the "two cultures" formula obscured rather than illuminated what was wrong with industrial modernity. The row went on in the correspondence columns of The Spectator and Encounter for months and has been relitigated, usually with decreasing intelligence, ever since.
Beyond the lecture, Snow wrote eleven novels in the sequence Strangers and Brothers (1940–70), tracking a single narrator — Lewis Eliot, plainly a version of Snow himself — through mid-twentieth-century English life in the provinces, Cambridge college politics, the wartime civil service, and the corridors of Whitehall. They were popular, are now unfashionable, and are probably better than their current reputation suggests as documentary of how twentieth-century British institutional life actually worked. He is included here because his Rede Lecture remains the touchstone for nearly every English-language argument about science, the humanities, and the organization of education.