CP Snow combines his personal impressions with general assessments of several key figures in the 20th century. He had met all of them: Rutherford, G.H. Hardy, H.G. Wells, Einstein, Lloyd George, Churchill (in committee meetings), Frost, Hammarskjold except one (Stalin). Snow’s approach succeeds in linking a personal look into these lives with their historical importance. Moreover, Snow also brings a unity to the book by making comparisons of the character traits of his subjects within the individual essays. Other important figures also make appearances including Lenin, Bohr, Trotsky, Russian writers like Gorky and Leonov and Ramanujan.

The relevant time frame for the individual lives ranges from the early twentieth century to the early 1960s. Many of the concerns shaping these lives are still with us today—but I must admit to some surprise when at the end of the Stalin chapter Snow raises questions about Presidential power that are very relevant in 2021.

Lord Rutherford (1871-1937). Cambridge University was the world center of experimental physics in the 1920s and 1930s. Rutherford, the father of modern nuclear physics, was the chief figure there. Snow met him when Snow was applying for a studentship in Pembroke College. While Rutherford favored and selected the other candidate, Philip Dee, one of Rutherford’s “brightest young men” whose specialty in nuclear physics was more on point than was Snow’s in spectroscopy, he sang Snow’s praises after the interview. (According to Wikipedia, spectroscopy is the study of the interaction between matter and electromagnetic radiation as a function of the wavelength or frequency of the radiation.) A big, hard-working man, Rutherford enjoyed creative work and receiving honors. He loved worldly success but was not interested in making money and died poor. Raised in poverty in New Zealand, he was only able to come to Britain because of a scholarship. He was as original as Einstein, but did not revolt against formal schooling. While his focus was on pure science, especially radioactivity, his work led to the creation of the atomic energy industry. (He rarely made mistakes in his scientific work but he did not foresee that atomic energy could be harnessed for commercial purposes). Using a simple experimental apparatus, in 1919 he was the first to break up the nucleus of an atom. He was recognized as the greatest experimental scientist since Michael Faraday, and according to Snow his research constituted the last supreme single-handed achievement in fundamental physics. Prior to World War II, physics was in its heroic age, and Rutherford rejoiced in the scientific revolution. Rutherford’s scientific world was free from class, ethnic and racial prejudice. Rutherford took the lead in opening English academic life to Jewish refugees after 1933. His favorite pupil, the Russian Peter Kapitsa, established an elite physics club at Cambridge. Loyal to the Soviet Union, Kapitsa returned permanently to his mother country when the Soviets called him back, but he kept up links with English science.

GH Hardy (1877-1947). Hardy was the most intellectually valuable relationship of Snow’s life. Not a great genius like Einstein or Rutherford, he was nevertheless the fifth best pure mathematician in the world. Very creative, his greatest discoveries were made in partnerships with Littlewood and Ramanujan, the Indian genius who he played an essential role in “discovering.” Hardy was an anti-narcissist who did not want his photo taken and had no mirrors in his room. He was also an atheist and refused to enter chapel. He had clerical friends but God was his personal enemy. (Hardy loved cricket and Snow tells the story that he would always bring an umbrella and rain gear so that God, out of spite towards Hardy’s expectation, would ensure a sunny day). He led the happy life of an active young man until his 60s, which made his last years all the darker as his health, and his talent for mathematics, failed. Mathematics was his justification for existence. He was also a radical all his life. He opposed the First World War and supported Bertrand Russell in his struggles over pacifism with Trinity College in Cambridge where they were both fellows. Later in life he wrote up the dispute. After the war, he left Cambridge and went to New College at Oxford, which was more relaxed than Cambridge. Very distrustful of English politicians, he kept a portrait of Lenin on his wall. In 1931 he returned to Cambridge--after all, Cambridge was still the leading center of mathematics in England. This is when Snow met him. Snow had played cricket as a young man, and was brought into Hardy’s confidence after Hardy examined him closely on his knowledge of the sport. He was a great conversationalist and listener. The most important story in Hardy’s life is the discovery of Ramanujan. This mathematical genius, who with little formal training had independently discovered existing and new mathematical formulas, sent his work, at the urging of friends in India, to leading physicists in England. Two of the recipients of his work put him off, but Hardy did not. Hardy was used to receiving materials of doubtful quality and authenticity in the mail, but after an initial review of Ramanujan’s work, in a bored state, he could not get it out of his mind. If the work were fraudulent, it still would have taken a genius to create it. Would someone intent on fraud or a hoax make such an effort? After spending an evening with Littlewood reviewing the papers together, he decided Ramanujan must be brought to Cambridge where his talents could be fully developed.

HG Wells (1866-1946). As successful as he was as a writer, Wells’ main ambition was to be a professional scientist. He obtained a First Class-degree in zoology, but he had tuberculosis and a kidney condition which made full-time writing more practical than a scientific career. Because of the tuberculosis, he would face long periods away from work, although he was fortunate enough to get over the disease in his 30s. As a writer of “scientific romances” he invented “more literary devices” then most writers do in their whole career. Between 1900 and 1914, he also made a whole set of practical prophecies, including the concept of the tank and the military aircraft, which came true. Born in the lower middle class, he was only able to afford a secondary education when the headmaster of his school recognized his ability to take examinations and found money for him to advance his secondary schooling. He studied with Julian Huxley, the great educator of his age. Like Lloyd George, he was a radical all his life, and met Lenin, who considered him a dreamer. Although he was as talented a writer as Dickens, at 34 he began his career as a great educator. He had a vision of a new society to be built upon science, including breaking with sexual traditions. Again like Dickens, he had numerous love affairs. His vision of the new society rationalized his own life and much of it has come true. But he was never an optimist, and had an Augustinian view of life. Like Dickens, there was darkness in his books. At the end of his life, his last remaining ambition was to obtain his FRS, Friend of the Royal Society. Snow sought to assist him in his effort and was very troubled because the Royal Society did not show Wells the flexibility that they had shown in electing politicians and other non-scientists to the FRS. He had cancer, and his last years were not enviable. Snow states that the old age is of each of the individuals he is writing about were harrowing to those close to them.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955). According to Hardy, Einstein and Lenin were his two most important contemporaries. Snow agrees, and writes “if Einstein had not existed, 20th-century physics would itself have been different: this one could say of no one else, not even Rutherford or Bohr.” Einstein was noble, good, gentle and wise, but also rigidly independent (“unbudgeable” according to Snow). Both Churchill and Einstein had strong egos, but Einstein learned to “submerge” his personal self in his scientific work. But also like Churchill, Einstein had paradoxes in his career. At 37, Einstein was universally recognized as the greatest theoretical physicist of his age, the equivalent of Newton, but after 37 he ceased to make contributions and pursued a scientific path that virtually all of his contemporaries rejected. He detested militarism, which he described with the German word “Zwang.” In 1905 he published five papers on different subjects, three of which were among the greatest in the history of physics: (i) the quantum explanation of the photoelectric effect, for which he won the Nobel prize; (ii) the statistical law concerning Brownian motion, the erratic movement of particles in liquid; and (iii) the special theory of relativity, which “amalgamated space, time and matter into one fundamental unity.” Very quickly other physicists recognized that he was a genius, including Max Planck in Germany. In 1916, he published his theory of general relativity. This was the greatest revolution since Newton and his predictions were confirmed by experiments. Einstein’s theory predicted both Newton’s theory and the perihelion motion of Mercury, which Newton had not accounted for. The general theory made him well known to the public and, Snow believes, he enjoyed being a celebrity. In the 1920s he supported Zionism and was an international pacifist. However, his pacifism changed because he immediately recognized the dangers of the Nazi regime (even before Churchill) and became Hitler’s greatest public enemy. As noted above, in his physics, he pursued the opposite path to his contemporaries. “They believed that the fundamental laws were statistical, that, when it came to quantum phenomena, in Einstein’s picturesque phrase, God had to play at dice. He believed in classical determinism that, in the long run it should be possible to frame one great field theory in which the traditional concept of causality would reemerge.” But despite forty years of work he failed to discover his unified field theory. Einstein was not a sentimental optimist; rather he took a dark view of the future of the human race, but saw it as “an absolute moral imperative” to do what one could. Einstein was not the father of nuclear energy. But he gave other scientists a channel to alert the White House to the need to beat the Nazis in developing a nuclear weapon. At that stage in July 1939, he saw no moral dilemma in developing the bomb. But he thought the use of the atomic bomb against Japan was unforgivable, and Snow seems to agree with this. As a young man Einstein was merry and frequently laughed, but when he was older he lost his youthful merriness. He loved to sail, and Snow remarks that he was physically the strongest of the individuals described in this book.

David Lloyd George (1863-1945). Snow tells the interesting story of how they met. In 1937, Snow was spending the Christmas holiday alone at the Hotel du Cap (Eden Roc) in Antibes. Lloyd George was there with his party. Seeing Snow alone, Lloyd George, through his son, invited Snow to join his party. At the time Snow was a “complete unknown.” Later, Lloyd George sheepishly confessed that he was interested in the shape of Snow’s head because of his knowledge of phrenology. In later years they would continue to meet at the same locale in the Christmas season. Lloyd George and Churchill were allies and good friends, but quite different personalities. Snow quotes his boss Lord Hankey concerning the following example, the subject of balloons: “Winston, without a blink will give you a brilliant hour-long lecture on balloons. LG, even if he has never seen you before, will spend an hour finding out anything you know or think about them.” Lloyd George remarked that Churchill was a man of action, so whenever a problem developed, he would “get out his maps,” i.e., look for the military solution. Lloyd George was always fighting Churchill’s opponents to get him into the government, and Churchill stood by Lloyd George in the unfortunate Marconi insider trading scandal. Lloyd George was very charming, always wanted to please, could forget himself and he listened. He liked to read history but not much fiction. He could not stand serious novels that had sad endings. In politics, Lloyd George was a radical, while Churchill was a conservative. Reflecting his Welsh roots, Lloyd George’s radicalism had an agrarian bent. He was never a labor radical and could not speak for the industrial working class. He was proud to be the father of the welfare state in England. However, his social passions never got organized into “an intellectual framework.” Snow states that Lenin was the only contemporary of Lloyd George who had greater political gifts. It is often said that Churchill was the greater statesman and Lloyd George the greater politician. Both were great orators. Lloyd George entered Parliament in 1890 and was a member in the cabinet of the Liberal Government in 1906. The government was oligarchic but reformist. Lloyd George was on the extreme left of the government and thus attracted the maximum hatred from the Conservatives, but he had two sources of strength: support from outside Parliament, in the “country,” and the moral high ground from being on the left. Lloyd George was fond of women; unlike many eminent politicians of the time who had no use for women’s company, the opposite was true for Lloyd George. Lloyd George wanted power with the goal of winning the war. According to Lord Hankey, without Lloyd George as Prime Minister, the war could not have been won. It is easy in hindsight to criticize him, for example, for not having avoided the battle of Paschendale and not having sacked General Haig. However, if he had done so he himself would have lost his power in the government. Lloyd George used to say that they “made every imaginable error and finally won the war.” Lloyd George did not have Winston Churchill’s passion for the military art but he was a great strategic thinker. He despised Chamberlain and saw the danger of Hitler’s evil genius but did not recognize Hitler’s charm. Snow believes that when Lloyd George met Hitler at Berchtesgarden in 1936, Hitler out charmed and out flattered him. Because he lacked an intellectual framework, he also had difficulty evaluating the initial phases of national socialism which combined social advances with its fascist tendencies. Churchill was more firmly anchored because he had the British past to hold onto. Lloyd George was a realist who expected England would lose the war against Hitler. Fortunately, Churchill was not realistic and would not countenance giving up the fight.

Winston Churchill (1874-1965). His voice of will and strength gave hope in the beautiful summer of 1940. Everyone was busy with a purpose. The English were united and nationalistic. It was, oddly, a happy time. Churchill’s patriotism was absolute; he would sacrifice anything for the country. “The last aristocrat to rule -- not preside over, rule -- the country. The last assertive cry of a nation which, for no particular reason, had governed a disproportionate slice of the world.” His life was full of paradoxes. He became Prime Minister against the ill will of the majority of his own party, who would have picked Lord Halifax if Labor had not insisted upon Churchill. And he was promptly thrown out of office when the war was over. “If Churchill had died at 65, he would have been one of the picturesque failures in English politics.” Up until then, ”his record of brilliant failures got longer…. In the 30s Churchill seemed to most of official England the classical case of the man with a brilliant future behind him.” He had no “judgment,” did not have good antenna for what other people thought. But Churchill had deep insight, which is sometimes a better guide than judgment. He saw that Hitler was absolute danger. (His scientific advisor Lindemann also saw this). “Macauley said of Oliver Cromwell that everyone, whether they believe in kings or not, could not help feeling that he was the greatest prince who ever ruled England. I suspect that may be something like the attitude of posterity to Churchill, at any rate in the first year of his wartime administration.”

Robert Frost (1874-1963). While Snow presents a remarkably unflattering portrait of Robert Frost, he also writes that, of all the individuals discussed in his book, he would have chosen Frost for company before all of them except Hardy. Frost’s correspondence with Louis Untermeyer, in which he was bluntly honest, helps us differentiate the private Frost from the public persona. Frost was not “an especially good man:” complex and tedious, sometimes a bit of a fraud (lying about his age, pretensions of being a simple New England farmer), attitudes of extreme reaction (he was against the poor, but showed no traces of anti-Semitism), very envious of T.S. Eliot’s success, and always needing recognition and reassurance in terms of praise and awards. “In extreme old age, when Frost looked a grand patriarchal figure, he preserved a young man’s ambition, a young man’s rancor, a young man’s passion for desires unsatisfied.” He ached to receive the Nobel Prize and never did. Ezra Pound helped him achieve his first success as a poet in England but they quarreled because Pound tried to get Frost to follow Pound’s stylistic rules. However, Frost did repay Pound later in life, helping him get out of an asylum in Bethesda, Maryland. A man with dazzling blue eyes, Frost lived a life of passionate experience, accompanied by great suffering of his family, several children died young. He saw his highest duty to be writing poetry, at the expense, if necessary, of the well-being of himself and his family. As a poet he had complete integrity and kept to his standards. He wrote poetry until he reached an advanced age, which is rare according to Snow.

Dag Hammarskjold (1905-1961). Hammarskjold differed from other figures in the book because he was a religious believer. (Einstein had religious feeling but no religious belief.) Hammarskjold’s diary is an account of his attempt to unite the active and the contemplative life. Like Churchill, he was born in the upper class; not in the traditional Swedish nobility but rather in the aristocracy of officials that emerged in the 16th century. Charles de Gaulle had a similar background. Hammarskjold had academic success and was clever and hard-working. He rose through the Swedish bureaucracy and government in various key roles. He was the top aide to the Swedish Minister of Finance who created the Swedish welfare state. Hammarskjold was not a socialist, but a good manager. He became Secretary General of the United Nations while still under the age of 50. He wanted to leave a mark on history and enjoyed being a world figure. He wanted to make policy as well as implement it. In his diary, he said that, in our era, the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action. He was aware of the difficulty of achieving much at the UN. Did the UN and Hammarskjold make a difference in Suez, the Congo? It is hard to say. Nevertheless, he felt heroic failures may have an impact over time. At the age of 49, he recovered his faith. He thought all men are equals as children of God. At the same time that he was involved in great affairs, he felt he was reaching for God. The only value of life is its content for others. In meeting Hammarskjold, Snow was surprised to recognize a similarity with Hardy, even though the two men were different in so many other respects. It was a sparkling, vivacious manner of speaking that reminded Snow of Hardy. But Hardy was an extreme anti-narcissist while Hammarskjold was a classical narcissist. Neither Hardy nor Hammarskjold would have a happy marriage or a passionate devotion returned. Hammarskjold had a powerful mind but was not as creative as Hardy. Hammarskjold went him from success to success but never achieved a permanent happiness and had thoughts of suicide at the height of his fame. When Hardy’s creative powers failed him, his thoughts also turned to death.

Joseph Stalin (1879-1953). Snow never met Stalin but heard a story about him from his friend the Russian writer Leonov. Before the great purges, Leonov attended a dinner with Stalin, Gorky and other writers. Stalin questioned Leonov about his views on Dostoyevsky, and Leonov could tell Stalin was not happy with his answers. However, Gorky, who had significant influence with Stalin, spoke up for Leonov on the spot. Leonov thought that Gorky’s intervention saved his life-- others in his generation died in the purges. Snow follows up on the story by informing us that Stalin had mastered classical Russian literature as a student, was much better educated in literature than Western leaders and wrote poetry in Georgian, his native language. Stalin thought Dostoyevsky was a great writer, even though Dostoyevsky had a bad influence on the youth. When he was the supreme leader, Stalin would read books before they were published, not only for political reasons but also for his own interest. He would even “suggest” corrections. Snow then makes the general point that writers and the written word are more consequential in Russia than in the West. In Tsarist Russia, writers were the opposition. Russians tend to overrate the importance of writers in Western societies and are puzzled when writers such as Hemingway (who had more influence on modern Soviet writing than any other Westerner) turn out to have no political importance at all. Turning to Stalin’s broader significance, Snow notes he changed “our lives” more than any other individual discussed in the book. Snow loves Russia and Russian literature. He did not put too much faith in the Soviet system, and from the 1930s he realized the concentration of power would bring dangers. On the other hand, Snow hopes the Soviet system will develop and work since Western capitalism is not the only path to progress. Capitalism does many things better than the Soviet system, but the Soviet system also does some things better than capitalism. Stalin was born in a poor peasant family and learned at an early age to be secretive. As a teenager, he hid his anti-Tsarist views and rebellious activities from his teachers, who ultimately expelled him from the seminary when he was 20, but mainly because they had become aware of his passion for secular literature. He rarely left Russia before the revolution, although he spent several years as a prisoner in Siberia. It was Lenin, a first-class judge of men, who saw Stalin’s potential administrative ability and put him on the Central Committee in 1912. Trotsky, although a great writer, orator and military organizer, was not a good judge of men and did not have good antenna for political and bureaucratic infighting. He and the other Bolshevik leaders continually underestimated Stalin. Stalin was realistic and cautious and had great strategic judgment; he was not romantic and never believed that Germany and other Western European countries would achieve a successful communist revolution. Accordingly, he always knew that Russia’s challenge after the revolution was to build socialism in one country and not to put faith in assistance from more advanced economies. Stalin had “absolute respect and loyalty” for Lenin, but when Lenin’s health faltered, Stalin was keen to hold power not just for its own sake but to save Russia and the Soviet system. Stalin succeeded because he saw the importance of gaining control of the administrative machinery that his rivals ignored, especially control of personnel decisions. Trotsky never had a chance against Stalin. He was an intellectual and, like Churchill, his judgment was often “brilliantly wrong.” Stalin was much better at political chess than all of his rivals. Snow thinks the only person who might have stopped Stalin would have been Lenin himself, who, if he had lived, could have intervened and trained others who could compete with Stalin’s strengths. As it was, Stalin was the man in charge in 1928 after Lenin had his third stroke. In assessing Stalin’s autocratic rule, Snow believes that his policies to jump start the Industrial Revolution in Russia by collectivizing agriculture were correct-- otherwise, it would have taken decades to catch up with the West. However, Snow believes that the horrifying losses among the kulaks and poor peasants could have been mitigated if the collectivization policy had not been executed about as badly as it could be. As for the purges in the 1930s and the postwar period, Snow offers no excuses. Instead, he gets into psychological analysis of Stalin’s paranoia, in particular his suffering from persecution mania. He thinks this aspect of Stalin’s personality got worse in the mid-30s and so would not have been visible to Lenin in the 1920s or earlier. In concluding the discussion of Stalin’s psychological problems, Snow addresses the broader issue of how a society can ensure control over its leader, including references to the US presidency, that are clearly still relevant today. He notes that FDR, Churchill and Woodrow Wilson all had health issues in the final years of their public service. He then asks “what would happen if an American president suddenly became unbalanced?” His answer is that of course the individual would be put in hospital, but what might happen before that is done? “The more practical question is, how does a society give power to a leader and at the same time make sure that it can be controlled?” ( )

We like to read about people. Real people. We like to get the facts about their lives in story form or in lively character sketches. We like to infer motives and judge character and reflect on their values. Sometimes we like full-fledged biographies, but not always. Good solid essays, of the sort that in the old days would have appeared in the New Yorker magazine or as a Time cover story, might be just right – not Reader’s Digest or the Columbia Desk Encyclopedia: good solid essays, of reasonable length, but with specific details, written in a graceful essayist’s style, but not Henry James elegance.

C.P. Snow’s Variety of Men is just such a book: nine essays on nine interesting men, from the not very well-known Rutherford (father of nuclear physics, whose first name is never mentioned) to the very well-known Winston Churchill, from the enigmatic Einstein to the idiosyncratic Robert Frost, from the uncelebrated British Prime Minister Lloyd George to the internationally admired Dag Hammarskjöld to the deadly notorious Stalin.

In his preface, Snow announces quite candidly, “I should like this book to be read as a set of personal impressions, and no more than that.” Given his style and the amount of autobiographical detail he includes, one is never tempted to read them as any more authoritative than that. As is often the case, one learns – or is able to infer – as much about Snow as about most of his subjects. “I wrote the book for fun,” he says, “not because of the grandeur of most of my subjects, though of course that helped.” Well, we read them for fun, too, and not for the “grandeur” of his subjects but for their humanity – a humanity that is unique to each one, yet at the same time, one that we all share. “The variety of human beings,” Snow maintains, “has been my chief pre-occupation ever since I can remember. . . .”

Snow surprises us with new information, or perhaps confirms what we already know or suspect; he sometimes delights us with irony and disorder, but he almost always leaves us with a fuller, more credible person that has been available to us in the public press or scholarly investigation or carefully preserved personae. We know that Snow is opinionated (he admits it, in his own terms), but he can also be very persuasive; hence, inevitably he shapes our thinking about each figure he explores.

Frost, for example, Snow opines, “. . . he was not a good man at all.” Without giving many specific examples, he insists,

He was both complex and extravagantly devious. He never did anything he didn’t want to do: under a mask of helplessness, he spared nobody in getting – not everything, but almost everything he wanted. He was capable of acting, stripping off façade after façade like onion-skins. He was sometimes a bit of a fraud.

From what I’ve read and heard elsewhere, I think Snow is fairly accurate in this harsh judgment, but his language is more confident, more magisterial, than one usually finds reliable: not just devious but extravagantly devious; he never did anything ; he spared nobody. The universals are hardly emasculated by the qualifying language that follows: not everything, but almost everything; sometimes a bit of a fraud. Snow is dept with telling analogies; for example, like onion-skins, but generous with anecdotes only when he's on hand as a first-hand witness.

Nevertheless, just when a reader’s mistrust of Snow is about to crescendo, he comes out with an insight that is informative and convincing, or at least provocative of intense thought. Speaking of Frost’s letters, shortly after the passage quoted above, he verifies the complexity of the poet’s nature, almost praising him, at least recognizing the depth of his character. Maybe he’s dishonest, manipulative, “a bit of a fraud,” but he can also be absolutely honest about himself. His letters, indeed, are “great documents of self-revelation.”

Here all Frost’s onion-skin façades are, deliberately, stripped away. Nearly all – not quite, but nearly – dissimulations are kicked aside. In one of his contradictory aspects, Frost, who was capable of lying, was also capable of savage honesty. These letters contain passages of introspective insight that make most introspective writers look as though they were making self-indulgent excuses for themselves.

However, in the long run, as stirring as such passages can be, it’s not really his own personal assessments of each character he writes about that make Snow’s book such a satisfying experience for the reader. It’s the juxtaposition of the nine different characters – very different. His beginning with the calm, self-effacing, ingenious Rutherford has to have been a deliberate choice. Without being explicit about his strategy, he has provided a prototype with whom all the reflects his admiration for the subject in a quiet, unobtrusive way. The essay, like the man, is simultaneously more private and less ambiguous than the others.

But why would Snow conclude his book – more laudatory than disparaging, more hopeful than despairing – why would he opt to conclude with Stalin, whom he sees representing paranoia in high places? I’m not at all sure. Maybe his central question throughout the book has been, how to we choose whom to admire? How do we live with the flaws in our heroes and the dangerous instincts in our leaders? How do we prevent the disorder that inheres so naturally in the characters of complex, creative, persuasive men?

Two paragraphs within the last two pages of Snow’s book deserve to be read over and over again. They prompt one to re-read his book to explore the path he has taken to reach these insights.

This book was published in 1966, close to half a century ago, and yet this passage seems even more accurate, and even more threatening, today than could have been imagined in the Sixties:

The more practical question is, how does a society give power to its leaders, and at the same time make sure that it can be controlled? In the cruelest form, this was the problem, and the insoluble problem, of the Stalin era. But it is also a problem, though a lesser one, in parliamentary systems like ours [the British] or that of the United States. By necessity, by the increased centralization of a highly articulated state, an English Prime Minister, and much more an American President, has been given power which would have been unthinkable in the nineteenth century.

Indeed. Indeed. In the nearly fifty years since Snow penned these words, our US society has moved closer and closer to oligarchy, imperialism, and autocratic repression. Our schools do not teach students how to prevent this. Our media are no longer diligent in exposing culprits. Our eligible voters are more apathetic, more easily manipulated by images and sound bites. The checks and balances to which Snow refers no longer check tyranny or balance aggressive powers. Paranoiacs have more and more potential to appeal to the public imagination.

With characteristic aplomb, Snow immediately provides us a hopeful counter-intuition. I wish I found it as convincing as I might have in the 1960s, as optimistic as his previous insight was menacing.

The wonder, at least to me, is that human beings can be so resilient. Many Russians, contemporaries of mine, have known civil war, Stalin, the Hitler war, experiences which to us are unimaginable. Yet they warm one with illimitable Russian hope.

Paranoia? Or resilience? Which would predominate if someone were to write a book on nine such men – or women – from the past half-century? Who would the nine be? Who would your nine be? What would be learn from them?