[The Realists] is not a book about the nature, workings, values or preoccupations of realistic fiction. This is a pity, since, as critics like Rubin Rubinowitz have shown, C. P. Snow, as a reviewer in the early Fifties, wrote a series of attacks on 'experimental' writing and praise of socially responsible, 'neo-realist' novels which helped to influence both the writing and reading of fiction at that time. If his novels were then over-valued, I believe they are underrated now, because the realistic virtues they display have again become unfashionable. The careful analysis of public behaviour, domestic affections and affiliations, ambition, movements of money, and organisations like the Law or the scientific hierarchy, are not what we are thought to want to read about, unless we are offered them with a touch of irreal nightmare mockery. Snow may, we suspect, not tell us exactly what we want to know...