First edition. The writer, scientist, and politician C.P. Snow (1905-1980) worked as a scientist and scientific administrator while beginning his ‘Strangers and Brothers’ sequence of novels, which commenced with Strangers and Brothers (later re-titled George Passavant) in 1940. Drawing upon his experiences during the 1930s, World War II, and the postwar era, the eleven novels of the series concluded in 1970 with Last Things. ¶¶

Corridors of Power forms the ninth novel in the cycle, and its title entered the language (as had that of Snow’s celebrated essay ‘The Two Cultures’). In Corridors of Power ‘public and private concerns interact [...] on the ministerial level during the mid-1950s, including the question of Suez, but the public issue, Snow confides in a prefatory note, turns on an “unresolvable complication”. [The cycle’s protagonist Lewis] Eliot, largely here an observer, listens to the ambitious Roger Quaife, whose philosophy is “The first thing is to get power. The next – is to do something with it”’ (ODNB). This was the last of three of the novels in the sequence with a dustwrapper designed by the Australian artist Sidney Nolan, following The Conscience of the Rich (1958) and The Affair (1960). ¶¶¶