Corridors of Power (Strangers and Brothers, 9), C. P. Snow. Open Road Media (ASIN: B0DCPBFBZT) 2024 (first published in 1964).

Summary: An ambitious member of Parliament challenges Britain’s nuclear policy in the aftermath of the Suez crisis.

The phrase “corridors of power” has come into common political parlance. And it is C.P. Snow we have to thank for this. However, its use in the title of this novel was not its first. Rather, it occurs in an earlier novel Homecomings published in 1956. Both this and the earlier novel are part of Snow’s Strangers and Brothers series, written between 1940 and 1970. The novels narrate the education and career of civil servant, Lewis Eliot. This mirrors C. P. Snows own career, first as a physical chemist, turned civil servant, and later as a director of several science and technology organizations.

Eliot is serving an elderly cabinet minister at the opening of the novel, who is displaced, ostensibly due to ill health, by rising star Roger Quaife. Eliot continues to serve under him and is drawn into his ambitious, yet coldly realistic policy goals for the U.K. During this time, the country has come through the Suez Crisis, an episode revealing their declining power. Rather than to attempt to keep up pretenses, Quaife wants the U.K. to end its participation in the nuclear arms race, leaving it to the two rival superpowers. Much of the novel develops the efforts to politically sell this policy. Eliot’s role is to chair a committee of scientists to make recommendations about the policy. Quaife wants their endorsement, and all but a dissenting scientist get the message.

Eliot has another role to play as well. Quaife has the perfect political marriage, with a glamorous and influential wife (who is a good friend of Eliot’s wife). We follow them in the rounds of parties with rich and influential friends. But Quaife also is involved in an affair on the side. Eliot becomes involved when Quaife’s lover begins receiving letters threatening to expose the affair if Quaife doesn’t end it.

The novel builds toward twin crises as Quaife faces a political vote of confidence amid growing dissent over his proposed policy and his wife’s ultimatum to Quaife to end the affair. He has dazzled with his consummate political skills. But will that be enough to carry him through these crises?

The novel serves as a commentary on the U.K.’s relative waning power, yet is far ahead of the times. As of 2025, the U.K. is still a nuclear power and significant NATO partner. Whether it was Snow’s intent, it also seemed a commentary on the vacuity of political power. Indeed, I wondered whether Quaife’s affair was the one thing of meaning, of real humanity in a life taken up with ambition and power.

I think I only knew of Snow through his book The Two Cultures describing the breakdown of communication between the sciences and humanities. I came across this work as a deal in e-book format, not realizing it was part of a series. Even though it was the ninth in the series, it reads well as a standalone. I just might try a few more!