The full-cast BBC Radio adaptation of C. P. Snow’s epic series about the English establishment across the twentieth century

‘A vivid portrait of British academic, political and public life’ Guardian

‘A very considerable achievement… It brings into the novel themes and locales never seen before (except perhaps in Trollope)’ Anthony Burgess

In 1920s Leicester, Lewis Eliot must escape the drudgery of a council clerk’s office and his provincial lower class background to begin his decades-long rise to power. As the years pass, and Lewis progresses to successful London lawyer, to Cambridge don, to wartime service in Whitehall, to senior civil servant and finally retirement, he faces in his own life and the lives of those around him collapsing marriages, terrible illness, the politics of academia, Nazism, nuclear weapons, the price of power, and the ever-present realities of war.

The New York Times praised the book series, saying, ‘through [them] as in no other work in our time we have explored the inner life of the new classless class that is the 20th century Establishment’. John Betjeman claimed the books were ‘as full of life as life itself’. The Strangers and Brothers series captures perfectly the ever-present battle between political and personal integrity Lewis must face, as well as all the upheaval and social change of the two world wars and the decades that followed.

This adaptation stars David Haig and Adam Godley as Lewis Eliot, Bill Wallis as George Passant, Juliet Aubrey as Margaret Davidson, Stephen Moore as Herbert Getliffe, and Danny Webb as Percy Hall, with a full cast including Jeremy Swift, David Tennant, Anne-Marie Duff, Iain Glen, Claire Skinner and Tim McInnerny.