Strangers and Brothers

Snow’s earnest 11-novel sequence, Strangers and Brothers (1940–70), about a man’s journey from the provincial lower classes to London’s “corridors of power,” had its admirers. But the most inspired fictional cavalcade of social and cultural life in 20th-century Britain was Angus Wilson’s No Laughing Matter (1967), a book that…

Snow’s Strangers and Brothers, a comparable series that began in 1940 and continued to appear throughout the ’50s and into the ’60s, shows how a fictional concept can be realized only in the act of writing, since the publication of the earlier volumes antedates the historical…