• C P Snow. Corridors of Power. Review by Rae West

See also C P Snow's Two Cultures reviewed by RW

Review of British WW2 history and nukes C P Snow: Corridors of Power

Snow as an outsider, describing times before and after World War 2, June 26, 2010

Corridors of Power is probably the best-known—mainly because of the title—of a series of novels by Snow, which he wrote almost after the manner of Dickens; not stylistically, but about one every couple of years, starting in 1940 aged about 35 with 'Strangers and Brothers'. He gave the same name to his series of I believe eleven titles. Snow got off to a false start with a detective novel; then a story about science fraud, The Crystal, which H G Wells liked—Snow had a science background, but couldn't or wouldn't make a career of it. In his day, scientific brilliance was believed to be rare and hard to find; the triumph of Jews in the USA has led to an opposite view, in which any institution and any person is a serious scientist, provided money is there for publicity and salaries. After the 'Great War', Einstein had just such a promotional machine; Snow must have assumed there was something in it. His novels all have a similar feel: a series of short chapters with simple titles, and decisions being made on the basis of simple opinions and personal foibles. Rather like a classroom of children raising their hands to answer a question, but changing sides as signals are picked up. The sources of the signals are, however, not known to Snow. His novels are low in evidence, but high in guesswork, status, and low-level oratorical flourishes. (All his characters have verbal mannerisms, repeated each time they appear). Harold Hillman, the biologist whose life was made miserable by incompetents in official scientific positions, told me of a man whose name I forget, unwilling to discuss scientific theories, but fully informed on which team is working on what, and who thinks this, and who else thinks that, and where money is likely to go. A type Harold hated.

Snow was, I think, something of a poor boy made good, as Malcolm Muggeridge claimed in Oh no, Lord Snow probably a similar type to Melyvn Bragg and Clive James in the BBC later. (Biographical claims of youthful poverty are often fake). Another critic was the once-famous F R Leavis, of the magazine Scrutiny. It's only as I type this that it occurs to me that Leavis—look at the name—might have been Jewish, with his own agenda, perhaps including anti-Britishness. (Neither Snow's Two Cultures nor Leavis's replying comments are available freely online. Both are utterly outdated by revisionist work on Jews). Snow was paralleled in his Leicester upbringing by he rather ordinary round-specced historian, J H Plumb, who received money from Jewish sources and was inserted into Snow's novels here and there though not under his name.
Anyway, Snow was ambitious, and certainly not willing to rock any boat. In my view, his novels give a highly realistic picture of conventional life in Britain both before and after the Second World War. I'm tempted to call the view 'Middle Class', but that's not quite accurate, as it requires the assumption of attitudes which can't quite have been felt, for example people taken into the military and having a good war, or the omission of food and clothes coupons, or the omission of radio headlines.
Snow called the Second World War the 'Hitler War', not, understandably, seeing through the propaganda; I can find no evidence he had a clue about Jews and 'Communism', or Jews and science frauds, or Jews and wars, or Jews' other aspects of power. (I note that he was described as a close friend of Harry Summerfield Hoff, (1910-2002) who wrote novels (mostly under the name William Cooper) and according to Wikipedia worked for the Crown Agents and the UK Atomic Energy Authority. His account of Snow's novels was a short official publication. All this, and his Jewish publishers and the official but rather covert support for his work, leaves a suspicion of Jewishness, and possibly he helped surround Snow with Jews as a precaution against dangerous thoughts.)
His novel The Affair (published in 1960) combined a science fraud accusation with the Dreyfus Affair, which of course Snow interpreted in the usual oh-so-innocent-Jew sense. The title of the novel may have had sex appeal, but Snow says in the introductory material that the name came from the L'Affaire Dreyfus. The scientific fraud drew on 'the picturesque case of Rupp'—Emil Rupp having worked with Einstein on 'particle-wave duality'; I'd guess both in real life will turn out to be Jewish fraudstera.
Even if Snow ever harboured dangerous thoughts, he would not have put them into his novels, except in the actions of flawed characters, which of course his novels have. (E.g. a convinced technical Communist; an unsatisfactory wife; a scheming head of a Cambridge college).
All this is not quite fair on Snow; he wrote on 'Allied' atrocities against Germany, and perhaps Japan—Einstein on hearing the 'news' of Hiroshima said "Oy vey".

'Corridors of Power' fits into all this... as a shrewd reviewer here noted, there is in fact very little about actual 'corridors of power'—Prime Ministers, Civil Servants, Cabinet Ministers, military heads, nuclear physicists, directors of research establishments, and so on. The action is outsider stuff looking in—candidates for Parliament, backbenchers, people in country houses, acquaintances. Snow is incurious about the 'Hitler War' as he calls it, the 'Cold War', Churchill—he accepts all the usual attitudes. In fact his books include good examples of the 'Churchill cult' in Britain, corresponding to the Hitler cult in Germany, the Stalin cult in the USSR, and presumably Roosevelt cult and Eisenhower cult in the USA. He accepts the oddities of the Oxbridge system, has no criticism of the legal system (his protagonist is a lawyer), believes in removing capital punishment because progressives did. If you're looking for something of this sort—an evocation of England in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s—I think Snow's series must be high on a list of consistent portrayals of the period as perceived by middle class people in Britain who hadn't learned to look below the surface.

I wrote this in 2010, just before I was aware of the Jewish fraud of 'nuclear weapons'. I was aware of the Jewish 'holocaust' fraud, and of the way the Jewish media had centralised systems of lying. - RW 2020