Summary

This is the tenth and penultimate novel in C. P. Snow's <i>Strangers and Brothers</i> sequence. Sir Lewis Eliot has retired from public life to dedicate himself to his writing. His peaceful life is interrupted when he is called back to the provincial town of his youth, first to try to save the career of a friend who is a senior administrator at the town's new university, and then, at the request of his old friend George Passant, to monitor the trial of one of George's relatives, who has been implicated in the gruesome killing of a young child. In both situations, Sir Lewis is forced to confront issues of personal responsibility and to question if the call for total freedom by George Passant and his fellow radicals in the 1930s contain the seeds for an amoral world of self-indulgence and cruelty in the 1960s. Over the course of the novel, Sir Lewis must face both the unexpected return of many faces from his own past, and the coming of age of his own son and step-son and their generation.