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“... a believer that truth emerges from contradiction, a roughneck in argument’, according to Noel Annan, his predecessor as Provost of King’s. His friend Audrey Richards said that he could only get going on any topic by finding some established position to attack. There was also an element of showing off, and a strong desire to score in argument. ‘His ...”

“... a result of the conflict the UN has become increasingly marginalised. The Secretary-General Kofi Annan cannot openly condemn the operation for fear of driving the UN’s most important (if recalcitrant) contributor into isolation. Nor can he condone it openly for fear of further alienating many other states which are wary of US hegemony. Little wonder he has ...”

“... that, if the revolting students of the Student Revolution were revolting against Lord Beloff, Lord Annan and Sir Isaiah Berlin, there must have been something to be said in their favour.’ Yet there were skeletons in Cowling’s cupboard. Before the Suez furore aroused his contempt for liberal indignation, he had explored the possibility of a parliamentary ...”

“... perhaps counteracting – the report of a more globally representative panel, established by Kofi Annan, which is due to conclude its work in December. Blair seems unable to grasp what it means to have a rule of law. In Sedgefield he said: I understand the worry the international community has over Iraq. It worries that the US and its allies will, by sheer ...”

“... On the legality of the war most international lawyers and indeed the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, sided with Wilmshurst, and perhaps it’s a sense of vulnerability on this point that leads Greenstock to make an uncharacteristically impolite swipe at his former colleague. While Wilmshurst objected to the legal case for war in 2003, Greenstock ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with contempt: Ali Sistani, the Shiite Grand Ayatollah, in the shrine city of Najaf, and Kofi Annan. But too many mistakes were made in the first year of the occupation for a change of course to work ...”

“... is based on years of interviews with people who knew Blunt, many of whom – Dadie Rylands, Noel Annan, Isaiah Berlin, Francis Haskell, Michael Kitson, Ernst Gombrich – have since died. She also includes written evidence from the distant past: letters by Blunt’s schoolfriend Louis MacNeice, for instance, and most startlingly, the brisk character sketches ...”

“... Malcolm Speed, the chief executive of the ICC, found himself in a position much occupied by Kofi Annan and the United Nations in recent years: being bullied by a superpower for whom the notions of international law and collective responsibility have long ceased to have any meaning. In 1996, after what an Australian cricket official referred to as ‘a ...”

“... The reaction was the same after Suu Kyi asked the former UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, to head an advisory commission to find a solution to the violence in Rakhine. The ANP and other nationalists described this as an affront to Myanmar’s sovereignty. The public, meanwhile, remains indifferent. Years of misinformation about Muslims and ...”

“... aristocracy whose predominance in all corners of public life was so suggestively mapped by Noel Annan. After a first at Cambridge he spent a brief period as a history don, then married the daughter of Samuel Courtauld and entered Parliament in 1929 as member for his father-in-law’s ‘pocket borough’. A junior minister at the India Office before he was ...”

“... said. The most realistic hope for mediation lies with the UN. The recent appointment of Kofi Annan as the special envoy for Ban Ki-moon and the Arab League was the best news Syria’s silent majority has had for months. In spite of Hillary Clinton’s rhetoric, Washington may be backing away from demanding Assad’s resignation. The signs are that the US ...”

“... Syria’s legitimate representative. And they sabotaged the efforts of the UN special envoys, Kofi Annan and then Lakhdar Brahimi, to broker a political compromise that would have ended the fighting. On 30 June 2012, a meeting of what was described as an ‘action group’ on Syria, comprising Hillary Clinton, Sergei Lavrov, William Hague and a representative ...”

“... investigation of British broadcasting (a great deal more thoroughgoing than Peacock), Lord Annan had endorsed the licence as the best available system. But he also had some trenchant things to say about the way the BBC had conducted itself. A more responsive organisation might have used that opportunity to take stock of itself, to question whether, in ...”

“... not a balanced programme, and Margaret Thatcher would have found it unfair to entrepreneurs. Noel Annan has been saying in strong terms that the BBC has a duty to be ‘dispassionate’ about affairs of state, and that it owes this duty to the state, rather than the government: a distinction which has come to the fore lately, but which is not easy to ...”