Noel Annan, Baron Annan

Noel Gilroy Annan, Baron Annan OBE (25 December 1916 – 21 February 2000) was a British military intelligence officer, author, and academic. During his military career, he rose to the rank of colonel and was appointed to the Order of the British Empire as an Officer (OBE). He was provost of King's College, Cambridge, 1956–66, provost of University College London, 1966–78, vice-chancellor of the University of London, and a member of the House of Lords.

Quotes

1950s

• The profound emotional impact of the horror and slaughter convinced many that the values which had held good before the war must now, by definition, be wrong—if indeed they were not responsible for causing the war. A society which permitted such a catastrophe to occur must be destroyed, because the pre-suppositions of that comfortable pre-war England were manifestly false. Searching for a new way in which to regard conduct, the ’twenties came to see it through the eyes either of Mrs. Webb or of Mrs. Woolf.
  • 'The Mood of the ’Twenties', The Listener, Vol. XLV, No. 1145 (8 February 1951), p. 211

• The faith of the ’twenties lay not in political machinery but in education and in psycho-analysis: not in votes for women, but in freedom for women. This was the romanticism of a generation affecting to despise the romantic! What is more romantic than to see the eventual triumph of reason, the conquest by the social sciences of misery and evil, the revolution in morals as the panacea to cure the world?
  • 'The Mood of the ’Twenties', The Listener, Vol. XLV, No. 1145 (8 February 1951), p. 212

1960s

• It is true that in the most hallowed and ancient of our institutions of higher education, still whispering the last enchantments of the Middle Ages, it can be asserted that the best that has been thought and said must inevitably and inescapably be handcuffed to the study of the Anglo-Saxon. Still there has been a change.
• The diminished respect for authority brought about by the spread of egalitarianism, the multiplicity of choice and styles of life which greater affluence has made possible, the belief in the value of modernity, and the expansion of curiosity and interest, these seem to me to be the main forces which have disintegrated the old cultural pattern.
  • "The Disintegration of Culture", the Romanes Lecture delivered in Oxford (16 November 1965), quoted in 'Less Respect For Authority, Lord Annan Says', The Times (17 November 1965), p. 6

1970s

• Universities should hold up for admiration the intellectual life. For the most precious gift they have to offer is to live and work among books or in laboratories.
  • "What are Universities for, Anyway?", the Richard Dimblebey Lecture on BBC TV (31 October 1972), quoted in 'Lord Annan defends universities on TV', The Times (1 November 1972), p. 3

1980s

• It was right 25 years ago to expand higher education. It was wrong to think it could all be Rolls-Royce education. It was wrong to insist on parity of esteem between university and university and between universities and polytechnics.
  • Letter to The Times (3 February 1988), p. 15

• Professor Scruton should — from time to time — try to take the advice Keats gave to his brother. "The only way of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing — to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts, not a select party."
  • Letter to The Times (13 June 1989), p. 17

1990s

• Journalists who sneered at the incompetence of the intelligence services, and jeered that the Establishment was only interested in protecting its own, never considered that the rule of law is something that protects us all. That is the price one pays to live in an open society.
  • 'The greatest spy story', The Times Saturday Review (25 October 1990), p. 25
  • A review of KGB — The Inside Story by Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky

• Mr Grade is a brilliant television mogul, but on this occasion he has used the language of an insolent jackanapes. He cannot possibly "respect and support" ITC's authority. If he did he would at once apologise and promise not to commission a further series [of The Word]. The ITC was set up by Parliament to safeguard the public against gross breaches of taste, and he is lucky to escape from the infliction of a swingeing fine.
  Does Mr Grade expect us to believe the media-speak twaddle about "independent research"? Or does he think we are all so ignorant as to believe that all moral judgments are "subjective" and by implication worthless?
  Clearly his mind needs stretching by a few elementary textbooks on ethics which will enable him to realise that Channel 4 should not celebrate moronic presenters of programmes for sniggering schoolchildren.
  • Letter to The Times (12 June 1995), p. 19

• Oxford, Cambridge and the other elite universities are the guardians of intellectual life. They cannot teach the qualities that people need in politics and business. Nor can they teach culture and wisdom, any more than theologians teach holiness, philosophers goodness or sociologists a blueprint for the future. They exist to cultivate the intellect. All else is secondary.
  • 'Oxbridge dons: a crash course', The Times (24 November 1999), p. 38

Quotes about Noel Annan

• Noel Annan captures the last generation's spirit in his wide-ranging, superficial but annoyingly perceptive book Our Age. This was the ethic of the inheriting classes, the public school and Oxbridge intelligentsia and Civil Service élite. Its members staffed the bureaucracies and the media, devised the welfare state, dismembered the Empire, and sanctioned the plural society. They called themselves the great and good.
  • J. C. D. Clark, 'Managers maketh muddle', The Times (23 August 1995), p. 16

• In the 19th century the dons of Oxford and Cambridge emerged as a distinct social class, with their own peculiar and privileged way of life, mysterious to the outside world.... Noel Annan, who died in March at the age of 83, spent more than half a century living this life and writing about it. His last book, The Dons: Mentors, Eccentrics, and Geniuses (University of Chicago Press), is an affectionate elegy for a class that has largely expired.
  • Robert Fulford, The National Post (2 May 2000)

• [That] marvellous compendium of the higher gossip, Our Age.
  • John Gray, New Statesman, Volume 130, Issues 4553–4561 (2001), p. 54

• Thanks to two remarkable talks by Mr. Noël Annan on the B.B.C. three years ago, and to my own experience, I am more in sympathy with Kipling's philosophy now than ever I was in childhood or early manhood.
  • William Haley (writing under the pseudonym Oliver Edwards), 'Unlicensed Reading', The Times (9 May 1957), p. 15

• He is a fine, red-faced man with Corinthian features and a proconsular manner. He is very good at stimulating passion and fury and uses it, like his language, as a pawn in the game of committeemanship.
  • Peter Hennessy, 'Laying the broadcasting ghosts', The Times (24 March 1977), p. 4

• But there has always been another side to him; the high Victorian, Leslie Stephen side, Stephen being the subject of a brilliant biography he penned after the war.
  Lord Annan is a great believer in the essentially Victorian concept of the public authority, set up to protect and insulate areas of vital public interest from direct political interference.
  • Peter Hennessy, 'Laying the broadcasting ghosts', The Times (24 March 1977), p. 4

• When I was at Cambridge just after the war, one of my lecturers was Noel Annan. He was shortly to become, at 39, the youngest ever Provost of King's College. His subject was "Social and Political Thought in the 19th Century". After four years of intellectual stultification in the Army (working briefly in a similar branch of intelligence to Lieutenant-Colonel Annan), I found his course just too packed with ideas, and gave it up — to my eternal regret.
  The same kind of brilliant compression and synthesis, distinguishes his latest book.
  • Alistair Horne, 'From Hitler to Adenauer: a tale of two nations', The Times (16 November 1995), p. 39
  • A review of Changing Enemies: The Defeat and Regeneration of Germany by Noel Annan

• Annan's eye is beadier than anyone's one knows. As a child of Bloomsbury, he describes its cottage culture with an intimate acerbity... Annan acknowledges that it was from Bloosmbury that Our Age learned the lesson that the conquest of jealously is the mark of civilised behaviour, a maxim as hard for the inamorati of the Annan generation as it was for those of Bloomsbury.
  • Fiona MacCarthy, 'The cult of Annanimity', The Times Books (29 September 1990), pp. 20-21
  • A review of Our Age: Portrait of a Generation by Noel Annan

• Noël Annan himself, who in Who's Who’s most stylish entry, defines his recreation as "writing English prose", and this book, a prize example of literary gamesmanship, reminds one marvellously of what English prose is like.
  • Fiona MacCarthy, 'The cult of Annanimity', The Times Books (29 September 1990), p. 21

• Our Age by Noël Annan...is a personal portrait of his generation by one of the most enigmatic people of the period, a maverick at work in the corridors of power. This is a superb performance, wily, trenchant and amusing.
  • Fiona MacCarthy, 'A literary feast for Christmas', The Times (1 December 1990), p. 24

• Throughout the long years of his retirement, Noël Annan maintained a reputation as one of the most controversial academics of his time... he was a man with whom it was notoriously imprudent to tangle, particularly in the correspondence column.
  • 'Lord Annan', The Times (23 February 2000), p. 27