Lewis Eliot, the diffident protagonist of the Strangers and Brothers sequence, retreats to the background in this absorbing study of his mentor, George Passant, a charismatic solicitor’s clerk. In the years of economic depression between the wars, George – an idealistic radical bursting with notions of creating the world anew – gathers about him a group of young people who, restive and ambitious, trust him to emancipate them from the constraints of their provincial lives. But when his lofty aspirations become muddied with a need for money and desire for sexual freedom, his power over the group becomes a danger to them all. Politics, people and the rapidly changing social landscape of inter-war Britain are narrated with Snow’s trademark subtlety and precision in this fascinating analysis of a god with feet of clay. 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.

Novelist and cultural commentator C.P. Snow was a large and controversial presence in his lifetime but his work has been largely neglected since his death in 1980. This is the first 21st-century book to offer a clear, informed and sympathetic survey of all his novels and major non-fiction books and to affirm their importance for the world today.

This book studies C.P. Snow's eleven-volume series of novels (Strangers and Brothers) as documents detailing the social and political life of mid-twentieth-century Britain, and points out the uses for the novels in the academic study of that time period. Both Snow and his central character, Lewis S. Eliot, started from unremarkable origins in terms of their mutual background in the lower reaches of the middle class, their dreams of success in their teen years, and their early professional education in a new, struggling academic institution in the mid-1920s. Neither could really be considered typical for men of their class. Eliot's working life would include being a very minor town clerk, a barrister, an advisor to a powerful industrialist, a Cambridge don, a moderately powerful civil servant, and finally, in early retirement, a writer. Eliot would befriend members of both the traditional and Jewish upper classes, scholars and brilliant scientists, powerful behind-the-scenes civil servants, second-tier British and Nazi politicians, financiers and industrialists, Communists, and writers and artists, providing a fairly broad overview of parts of the middle class and ruling elites of the periods. Snow's sequence of novels is therefore useful to the historian of twentieth-century Britain, both in understanding the period as it recedes away from common experience and in presenting the period in the classroom. Snow was a classic twentieth-century writer who presented a more balanced account of the British «governing classes» of the middle third of the twentieth century than did the upper-class (and would-be upper-class) or working-class writers of the same period. His novels provide an insight that every student of twentieth-century Britain must have on hand.

C. P. Snow’s Strangers and Brothers is a roman fleuve comprising eleven novels and covering a period of more than fifty years. The entire sequence is narrated by Lewis Eliot, an intelligent, sensitive, and decent man whose life progresses against the backdrop of some of the critical events of twentieth century history. The sequence is divided into novels of “direct experience” and “observed experience.” Although Lewis Eliot is present in the novels of “observed experience,” his personal life is given a secondary role, as he concentrates on several figures who have played crucial roles in his life. Snow carefully establishes his narrator’s emotional makeup in Time of Hope (which, though Snow’s third book in the series, precedes George Passant and The Light and the Dark in the narrative chronology). Set primarily in an unnamed provincial town in the Midlands of England, the novel depicts Lewis’ early years, characterized by a sense of insecurity stemming from the Eliot family’s genteel poverty following the bankruptcy of his father during World War I. -- From https://www.enotes.com/topics/strangers-brothers (Feb. 25, 2019).

This collection of critical essays covers hundreds of writers who have made significant contributions to British, Irish, and Commonwealth literature from the 14th century to the present day. The contributors analyze many individual works and engage the reader withtheir distinctive themes and stylistic. Introductory essays and chronological tables open each volume and provide historical background.

Time of Hope is the third in the Strangers and Brothers series and tells the story of Lewis Eliot’s early life. As a child he is faced with his father’s bankruptcy. As a young man, he finds his career at the Bar hindered by a neurotic wife. Separation from her is impossible however.