Strangers & Brothers‪.‬

C.P. Snow and Harry Summerfield Hoff shared one calling as scientists, and another as very influential writers. But they had different ways of approaching a blank sheet of paper, and different ways of looking at the fascinating world of the mid-twentieth century. As authors, one worked in the manner of a cabinet maker, the other more like a glass blower. But the two would never have been able to understand and express so much about humans and their physical, social, and political world if they had hot shared a special binary orbit. WHEN Harry Summerfield Hoff died late last year at a great age, his death marked the end of a unique literary symbiosis lasting well over hall a century and producing twenty or so of the most interesting novels of their language and time. Writing under the name of William Cooper, he burst onto the English literary scene in 1950 with Scenes from Provincial Life, which inspired and energized a generation of novelists starting with Kingsley Amis and arguably ending with Martin Amis, where the seam appears finally to have vanished into bedrock. Yet his last novel, sadly neglected, was written when he was nearly ninety years old, and contains some of the most powerful and poignant writing to be found. His mentor, benefactor, friend and foil was the creator of a landmark series of linked novels that were, in their own way, equally influential: Strangers and Brothers, the eleven novels that established C. P. Snow as one of the leading English writers of his day. Hoff and Snow were associated, and not just in literary ways, for more than fifty years, but they came together initially quite by coincidence for the least literary of reasons: they were both physicists. Their writing was at once very different and very similar, but for both of them the influence of the scientific cast of mind was fundamental.