[T]he life of a country is determined by its educational ideals—Scrutiny, 1932[I]t is obligatory for us…to look at our education with fresh eyes.—C. P. Snow, 1959In 1959 C. P. Snow turned a phrase that continues to shape our perceptions of intellectual life in the twentieth century. Intellectuals, he observed, were divided into “two cultures,” the arts and the sciences, and between them stood “a gulf of mutual incomprehension.” That gulf constituted a crisis, because while literary intellectuals were said to control the heights of power, only the scientists possessed the knowledge and vision necessary to confront the problems of the modern world. Snow’s argument attracted widespread comment on both sides of the Atlantic, and its continuing purchase is attested to by the Cambridge University Press’s reprint of the lecture in 1993 with an introduction by Stefan Collini.
Ian Maclean, The Renaissance notion of woman: A study in the fortunes of scholasticism and medical science in European intellectual life, Cambridge University Press, 1980, 8vo, pp. viii, 199, £7.50