Frank Raymond Leavis was born in Cambridge, in 1895, about a decade after T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and Ezra Pound, literary figures whose reputations he would later contribute to enhancing.
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New Bearings, devoted principally to Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, was an attempt to identify the essential new achievements in modern poetry (Bell 6).
This is a thinly disguised reference to real life critic F. R. Leavis, author of The Great Tradition and The Common Pursuit.
The literary critic F. R. Leavis was critical of this work, calling Snow a "public relations man" for the scientific establishment in an essay published in The Spectator, which was widely decried in the British press.
Q. D. Leavis (1906-1981), English literary critic and essayist
F.R. Leavis praised it highly, calling it "one of James' major achievements." Edmund Wilson, on the other hand, showed little patience with the "gibbering crew" surrounding Nanda with their vaguely corrupt schemes.