Corridors of Power (1964) is an exciting novel which traces the attempt of Roger Quaife, a Conservative Minister of Defence in the late 1950s, to push a Bill through Parliament by which Britain would renounce its nuclear weapons. Nothing like this happened at that time, so the story, for all its characteristic Snovian realism, has a conditional, “what-if?” quality, offering a sort of “alternative history”. It is the ninth novel in Snow’s “Strangers and Brothers” series, covering the years 1955-9. The phrase “corridors of power” first appeared in the seventh novel, Homecomings (1956, 591); but Snow remarked that he might have forgotten it if it had not been used as the title of Rayner Heppenstall’s review of Homecomings in the Times Literary Supplement (7 September 1956, 524; Snow (1964, v). It has since become common...
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Citation: Tredell, Nicolas. "Corridors of Power". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 10 May 2007 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=5816, accessed 14 December 2025.]
