Literature’s least attractive power couple

This book charts the rise and fall of one of the strangest power couples of modern times. The senior partner was initially Pam Johnson, a rising literary star, 28 years old and happily married with five novels under her belt and a fiction column on the Liverpool Post, when she singled out a novel by an obscure Civil Service scientist called C.P. Snow. He responded with a fan letter assuring her she could if she wanted ‘become quite easily the best woman writer in the world’.

Snow at 35 was tubby, pop-eyed and lumbering but his effect on her was electric, ‘like a current of magic energy’. She hailed his next novel as a masterpiece, and was as shocked as he was by the disobliging view taken elsewhere of what Anthony Powell in the TLS called ‘a painstaking and reliable account of university life’. By this time Snow himself reckoned he could hold his own with Flaubert and Turgenev, if not yet level with Tolstoy or Dostoevsky.