The Masters

<p><b>Winner of 1954 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction.</b><br><br>Widely regarded as C. P. Snow’s masterpiece, this lucid and compelling story of the contest for the Mastership of a Cambridge college is the fifth novel in C. P. Snow’s magnificent <i>Strangers and Brothers </i>sequence.<br><br>As the old Master slowly dies of cancer, his colleagues and peers jostle for power. Two candidates come to the foreground; Paul Jago – warm and sympathetic, but given to extravagant moods and hindered by an unsuitable wife – and Crawford, a shrewd, cautious and reliable man who lacks any of Jago’s human gifts. For Lewis Eliot, through whose eyes the narrative unfurls, the choice is clear, but politics and egos soon cloud the debate and the College is torn in two. <br><br>Depicting power in a confined setting with clarity and humanity, <i>The Masters </i>remains unsurpassed in its