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The notion that our society, its education system and its
intellectual life, is characterised by a split between two cultures
- the arts or humanities on one hand and the sciences on the other
- has a long history. But it was C. P. Snow's Rede lecture of 1959
that brought it to prominence and began a public debate that is
still raging in the media today. This fiftieth anniversary printing
of The Two Cultures and its successor piece, A Second Look (in
which Snow responded to the controversy four years later) features
an introduction by Stefan Collini, charting the history and context
of the debate, its implications and its afterlife. The importance
of science and technology in policy run largely by non-scientists,
the future for education and research, and the problem of
fragmentation threatening hopes for a common culture are just some
of the subjects discussed.
G. H. Hardy was one of this century's finest mathematical thinkers,
renowned among his contemporaries as a 'real mathematician ... the
purest of the pure'. He was also, as C. P. Snow recounts in his
Foreword, 'unorthodox, eccentric, radical, ready to talk about
anything'. This 'apology', written in 1940, offers a brilliant and
engaging account of mathematics as very much more than a science;
when it was first published, Graham Greene hailed it alongside
Henry James's notebooks as 'the best account of what it was like to
be a creative artist'. C. P. Snow's Foreword gives sympathetic and
witty insights into Hardy's life, with its rich store of anecdotes
concerning his collaboration with the brilliant Indian
mathematician Ramanujan, his idiosyncrasies and his passion for
cricket. This is a unique account of the fascination of mathematics
and of one of its most compelling exponents in modern times.
Winner of 1954 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. Widely
regarded as C. P. Snow's masterpiece, this lucid and compelling
story of the contest for the Mastership of a Cambridge college is
the fifth novel in C. P. Snow's magnificent Strangers and Brothers
sequence. As the old Master slowly dies of cancer, his colleagues
and peers jostle for power. Two candidates come to the foreground;
Paul Jago - warm and sympathetic, but given to extravagant moods
and hindered by an unsuitable wife - and Crawford, a shrewd,
cautious and reliable man who lacks any of Jago's human gifts. For
Lewis Eliot, through whose eyes the narrative unfurls, the choice
is clear, but politics and egos soon cloud the debate and the
College is torn in two. Depicting power in a confined setting with
clarity and humanity, The Masters remains unsurpassed in its quiet,
authoritative insight into the politics of academia. A meticulous
study of the public issues and private problems of post-war
Britain, C. P. Snow's Strangers and Brothers sequence is a towering
achievement that stands alongside Anthony Powell's A Dance to the
Music of Time as one of the great romans-fleuves of the twentieth
century.
2013 Reprint of 1959 Edition. Exact facsimile of the original
edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. This is
the publication of the influential 1959 Rede Lecture by British
scientist and novelist C. P. Snow. Its thesis was that "the
intellectual life of the whole of western society" was split into
the titular two cultures - namely the sciences and the humanities -
and that this was a major hindrance to solving the world's
problems. Published in book form, Snow's lecture was widely read
and discussed on both sides of the Atlantic, leading him to write a
1963 follow-up, "The Two Cultures: And a Second Look: An Expanded
Version of The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution."
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