[1][10] In 1923, he passed the intermediate British School Certificate, but remained at Alderman Newton's to work as a laboratory assistant for a further two years.

[12][13] Upon leaving Leicester, Snow gained a prestigious Keddey-Fletcher-Warr postgraduate studentship worth £200, allowing him to embark on doctoral research at Christ's College, Cambridge.

[3][23] As a politician, Snow was parliamentary secretary in the House of Lords to the Minister of Technology from 1964 to 1966 in the Labour government of Harold Wilson.

The two became friends, worked together in the civil service and wrote versions of each other into their novels: Snow was the model for the college dean, Robert, in Cooper's Scenes from Provincial Life sequence.

[26] In 1960, Snow gave the Godkin Lectures at Harvard University, about the clashes between Henry Tizard and F. Lindemann (later Lord Cherwell), both scientific advisors to British governments around the time of the Second World War.

For the academic year 1961 to 1962, Snow and his wife both served as Fellows on the faculty in the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University.

With the appeal of an insider's view, the novel depicts concerns other than the strictly academic that influence decisions of supposedly objective scholars.

He believed that in practice this deprived British elites (in politics, administration, and industry) of adequate preparation for managing the modern scientific world.

Later discussion of The Two Cultures tended to obscure Snow's initial focus on differences between British systems (of both schooling and social class) and those of competing countries.