“... the idea of a university post he was more than once mortified at being passed over. When Noel Annan, who had been a protégé at Cambridge, was elected to a fellowship at King’s, Runciman wrote him an extraordinarily spiteful letter: ‘I couldn’t disapprove more – not so much of King’s for choosing you: that was perhaps natural; but of you for ...”

“... Germany, including Bavaria and Hesse) was more lax and humane than under the British; as Noel Annan wrote in Changing Enemies (1995), the Americans ‘ran their zone on the principles of common sense and flew by the seat of their pants’. But not where words and books were concerned. The American public seems to have been more profoundly shocked by the ...”

“... and universities produce fewer scientists and technologists than in the USA or Russia.’ Noel Annan gave his study of the intellectuals who shaped postwar Britain the title Our Age, but 1945-79 has also been called ‘the Age of Asa’ – the title of a collection of essays edited by Miles Taylor. Briggs became a dominating voice in the Wilson and ...”

“... Bloomsbury on the left, Neo-Pagans on the right, these columns represent, more or less, Paul Delany’s relative definition of the two Edwardian intellectual groups. The first two pairs of adjectives are quoted from his Introduction. Of course, Bloomsbury and the Neo-Pagans had much in common: an educated upper middle-class background; Cambridge – almost all the men went there, and some of the women; at Cambridge, the Bloomsbury men mostly belonged to the Apostles, and so did Rupert Brooke and Ferenc Bekassy, a fringe Neo-Pagan; nervous breakdowns were common in both groups and treated by the same doctors with the same regime – called ‘stuffing’ – in the sense of fattening up; members of both sets recognised one another in the audience at the opera and Diaghilev’s London seasons ...”

“... ship’ was the British Empire; the words are those of the imperial historian Jack Gallagher. Noel Annan believed that the ‘peaceful divestment of the empire’ was ‘the most successful political achievement of Our Age’. The main actors on the British side all came out of it pretty chuffed, too. They must have been encouraged in this feeling by the ...”

“... games of chess, language games – are serious. In a famous broadcast delivered in 1951, Noel Annan declared that the Twenties, searching for a new way in which to regard conduct, came ‘to see it through the eyes of either Mrs Webb or Mrs Woolf’. That still seems an accurate description of what happened. But from the disadvantage point of the Eighties ...”

“... might be more to this story than appears is suggested by a puzzling absence: the name of Noel Annan, fellow and later Provost of King’s, a close friend, does not figure in it. If in principle such matters have their place in an autobiography, they are of slight moment otherwise. The main burden of Hobsbawm’s treatment of these years is ...”

“... a supra-national one. Asked his view of Britain’s entry into the EEC in the early Sixties (Noel Annan reports), he replied: ‘I do not find it necessary to hold opinions on such matters.’ Hayek, on the other hand, held firm and far-seeing ones. As early as 1939, he argued in his prophetic essay ‘Economic Conditions of Inter-State Federalism’ that ...”

“... even the 16th-century font recarved and thus deprived of its original design. 22 February. Noel Annan dies and gets good notices. He was one of the models for Duff, the best or certainly the most enjoyable character in The Old Country (1977). I always felt kindly towards him after learning that he would not stay in the same room as Paul Johnson. 15 ...”

“... to act on the Wolfenden recommendations, he had more than thirty acceptances, including from Noel Annan, A.J. Ayer, Isaiah Berlin, Maurice Bowra, J.B. Priestley, Stephen Spender, A.J.P. Taylor and Angus Wilson – in the full list, unlike in this sample, the heteros outnumber the homos. Encouraged by this apparently principled and broad-minded response, Dyson ...”

“... form. Just how distinctive the resulting discourse is became plain to me on reading Noel Annan’s Our Age. Here was a stylish narrative – of the English clerisy – which I recognised, and had contributed to in a marginal way. But another narrative was loping alongside, identifying characters in Annan’s story ...”

“... the most influential elaboration of the allegedly distinctive kinship pattern was Noel Annan’s 1955 essay ‘The Intellectual Aristocracy’. Annan itemised the numerous family links among successive generations of Arnolds, Butlers, Darwins, Keyneses, Trevelyans, Wedgwoods and so on, suggesting that they came ...”