On Ascension Day 1959, the well-known novelist and civil servant Sir Charles Snow delivered the Rede Lecture in the Senate House of the University of Cambridge. His title was ‘The two cultures and the scientific revolution’. He had first used the phrase ‘The two cultures’ as the title of an article in the New Statesman in October 1956, published just as the Anglo-French task force was preparing to retake the Suez Canal. Snow regarded his lecture as a modest and practical educational proposal, suggesting the need to train more scientists to develop new technologically based industries and for them to play a greater role in politics than they already did. He also suggested that it would be appropriate for those in the scientific culture to know more about literature (e.g. Shakespeare) and for those in the humanities to know more about science (e.g. the second law of thermodynamics).

Coming from someone whose ideal society was Harwell, these are rather naive, indeed patronizing, ideas, and they might have just sunk without trace had not the literary critic Frank Leavis, on the last day of February 1962, delivered his excoriating riposte in his Richmond Lecture at Downing College, Cambridge. Entitled ‘The significance of C.P. Snow’ and published in The Spectator ten days later, its tone still shocks after nearly fifty years. Snow, opined Leavis, was not only ‘not a genius, he is intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be’, and as a novelist Snow ‘doesn't exist; he doesn't even begin to exist. He can't be said to know what a novel is’, whilst the Rede Lecture displayed ‘an utter lack of intellectual distinction and an embarrassing vulgarity of style’, and so on, for several pages.

The consequences of the row that raged in the aftermath of Leavis's attack are still with us, witnessed by the numerous events and broadcasts held during 2009 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Snow's lecture. It is the history of this debate, its antecedents, the events themselves and the consequences that Guy Ortolano recounts so excellently in this very well-written book. After detailing the background to the views held and expressed by both Snow and Leavis, Ortolano tells the wonderful story of how these were played out by them in their respective colleges of Churchill and Downing.

Turning to the national stage, Ortolano traces the impact of the debate on social history (Snow thought that industrialization had brought great benefits to society as a whole; Leavis thought otherwise) and the relation of the debate to the ‘decline of Britain’ argument. Snow believed the lack of a strong scientifically literate workforce was contributing to the demise of Britain's power in the world – hence the coincidence (or was it?) in timing with the Suez crisis. One of the most interesting parts of this study concerns the group of scientists and Labour politicians – including Snow, Hugh Gaitskell, Patrick Blackett, Harold Wilson, Jacob Bronowski, Solly Zuckerman and James Callaghan – who met in the late 1950s and early 1960s to discuss science policy. In this group, as Ortolano shows, one can see the origins of Wilson's ‘white heat’ speech to the Scarborough conference of the Labour Party in October 1963. Snow's reward for his contributions was elevation to the House of Lords and appointment as a junior minister in the new Ministry of Technology – the political embodiment of Snow's technocratic views – established following the election of the Labour Government led by Wilson in 1964.

But the Two Cultures debate is not only part of the subject matter of the history of science. It is also closely related to the development of history of science as a discipline, particularly in Britain. Ortolano only covers this topic briefly and fairly unrepresentatively; surely much more could have been made of the chronological juxtaposition of the debate with the creation of departments and posts in the history of science in the late 1950s and afterwards. The issue here would be how they related beyond simultaneity – for example, the chair at the Imperial College of Science and Technology (later filled by Rupert Hall) was first mooted in 1957 as ‘dealing with the humanistic relationships of science’. This suggests some concern within the scientific community about the place of science in the wider culture, to which Snow's lecture and subsequent controversy gave a focus around which the arguments could be deployed. But this concern of the scientific community was not new. Whilst director of the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge in the 1940s and early 1950s, Lawrence Bragg arranged for his arts colleagues to deliver special courses of lectures to large numbers of appreciative science undergraduates.

Bragg, a pioneer of X-ray crystallography (and youngest ever Nobel laureate), was a more than competent artist who felt the need to overcome the narrow specialisms of science students and was on the committee that led to the founding of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science in Cambridge. He appears to have been one of Snow's patrons at Cambridge and, intriguingly, Bragg's daughters claim that he and Snow dreamt up the phrase ‘two cultures’ on a train to London; unfortunately contemporary documentary supporting evidence for this claim has yet to surface. However, it is documented that Bragg, after he had moved to the Royal Institution, was responsible for Snow changing his idea of what arts people should know about science from the second law to DNA when Snow published his ‘Second look’, shortly before he delivered his televised Friday Evening Discourse at the Royal Institution in 1963.

That none of this appears in Ortolano's book detracts little from its status as a very important work on a key topic of twentieth-century British history. It suggests rather that there is still more to learn; he has given an excellent foundation on which further studies can be based.