Noël Annan

Noël Annan, who died in 2000, was the author of Leslie Stephen and Our Age: Portrait of a Generation. He was provost of King’s College, Cambridge and then of UCL, and a trustee of the British Museum.

Letter

A Day at the Races

20 December 1990

Perry Anderson (LRB, 20 December 1990) called me Isaiah Berlin’s panegyrist, and in one respect his critique pleased me. Characteristic of his prodigious industry, he has read virtually everything Berlin has written or said in ephemeral interviews; and he is serious – not one snide personal remark. Yet Berlin has long been a thorn in his flesh. More than twenty years ago Anderson wrote an article...
Letter

Cambridge English

7 July 1983

SIR: Although I have hacked my way through the thickets of Raymond Williams’s prose (LRB, 7 July) I am far from sure that I have hit the trail. I thought one was meant to conclude that English studies would benefit if the study of literature as art was abandoned and the Tripos turned into a study of theories about literature and language, so that undergraduates will knit their brows no longer over...
Letter

Benson’s Pleasure

4 March 1982

Noël Annan writes: It wasn’t odd that homosexuality became a cult at the end of the 19th century in England. Proust’s Paris, Freud’s Vienna, Wilhelm II’s Berlin, where the Kaiser’s friend, von Eulenberg, was forced out of public life, were the contemporaries of Wilde’s London. But what was odd about homosexuality in England was the emergence of a cult which stood almost wholly apart from...
Letter

De-Nazification

15 October 1981

Noël Annan writes: It is a little difficult to reply to a scream and a sneer, but let me try. First the scream. If Mr Raphael refuses ever to speak to another German, it would be impertinent of me to reproach him. To stand in Yad ve-Shem is to feel grief and shame that one was a European at the time of the holocaust. But to translate rage into political action is another matter. Mr Raphael frankly...

Pieces about Noël Annan in the LRB

What once seemed certain is now an open question: Dons

Mary Beard, 27 April 2000

Noel Annan will be best remembered for Our Age, his grand, confident and sometimes very funny memoir written in the late 1980s, looking back at that generation of the British élite which...

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Our War

Nicholas Hiley, 7 March 1996

At first sight Changing Enemies is a welcome addition to the literature of modern Intelligence. The deliberate anonymity of the Official History of British Intelligence in the Second World War...

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Our Fault

Frank Kermode, 11 October 1990

The title of this large, attractive book needs explanation. It isn’t to be understood as a claim to deal with the times of all of us who are now alive. First, there is a chronological...

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Victorian Vocations

Frank Kermode, 6 December 1984

Frederic Harrison once climbed Mont Blanc and found Leslie Stephen on the top. Not an improbable location for the encounter of two eminent Victorians: and they might equally have met in George...

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