"The leading group of 1930s poets, other perhaps than Empson, admired technology (all those pylons in poems), but, unlike the Romantics, seem to have had no sense of living in an era of scientific wonders."
The interwar years in general, Needham in particular and China peripherally.
Hobsbawm's description of the 1930s era inadvertently describes a feeling that I can't quite put my finger on, and that is whether Chinese language and culture is a determinism, and of science in particular.
If we look, even now, majority of (public) Chinese intellectuals (as measured in the audibility of their opinions and ability to stir debate) are not engaged in the sciences but in the arts. This is the Chinese version of the gap between reason and imagination that Hobsbawm writes of interwar Cambridge. Except in China's case, the gulf has yet to be bridged...
