The second book in C. P. Snow's magnificent Strangers and Brothers sequence. Set between 1925 and 1933, it narrates the rise and fall of an idealistic solicitor's clerk in a small provincial town.

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.

A very considerable achievement . . . It brings into the novel themes and locales never seen before (except perhaps in Trollope).