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“... Fabian Paradise and presented the choice between Mrs Webb and Mrs Woolf that, according to Noel Annan, confronted England between the two world ...”

“... sexual offences with a pupil. As late as 1955, in his essay ‘The Intellectual Aristocracy’, Noël Annan was writing (probably with a knowing wink at fellow Cambridge dons) that Vaughan had been an exemplary headmaster who had ‘a winning way with boys’. Wide familial networks were created by marriages with cousins, with sisters and brothers of ...”

“... Oxbridge, and to have made a mark there, so the number of the eligible is really quite small. Lord Annan makes it clear that he speaks of, and inevitably to a great extent for, this small élite, into which one got by being exceptionally clever, or well-born, or usefully connected, especially with that intellectual aristocracy which occupied the commanding ...”

“... or cut my throat’), and his nurtured private sarcasms in later life on bêtes noires such as Noël Annan (‘He really is a shit’). The lockable volume had been given to a cousin of Forster’s father in the mid-19th century, and already contained a few pages written by him on ‘Directions for taking care of guns’. Forster adopted it in ...”

“... at the time, figure prominently in these biographies. Of Cambridge in particular we have in Noel Annan’s an account that is not only detailed but exceptionally animated. And I suppose we need help to imagine a Cambridge with little time for science and a suspicious attitude even to the newly-established Moral Science Tripos; a celibate institution which ...”

“... and its impact on 20th-century thought published half a century ago by Talcott Parsons, Noel Annan and H. Stuart Hughes. Although overtaken in detailed respects by more recent research, those three studies raised a number of questions – relating to the intellectual lineages of positivist thought, to its peculiar relationship to ‘Englishness’, and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... on each other and the quality of the conversation at the various occasions she’d attended (‘Noël was making eminent playwright conversation to leading lady ... He should be used as a cabaret and not as a guest ... the deserts of pomposity between the oases of wit are too vast’); the look of delight on George Wigg’s face when Debo Devonshire asked ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of dummies: Berlin, Betjeman, Kenneth Clark, John Sparrow, as well as, a little later, Noel Annan and Stuart Hampshire – all capable of the odd spot of talking themselves. But they acknowledged Bowra as their master, which was fortunate since no other terms were on offer. With the young, Bowra’s preferred pedagogical resource was the dinner ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... This was the era of Pevsner, Namier, E.H. Carr, D.W. Brogan, A.J.P. Taylor, Anthony Blunt and Noel Annan, all regular reviewers for the TLS (though the old, cosy TLS reappeared in 1946 when Russell’s History of Western Philosophy was sent to J.B. Hawkins, the vicar of Esher). May notes two milestones in the paper’s steady modernising: a review by Rose ...”

“... Intellectual hero to Noel Annan, whose political heroine is Margaret Thatcher, should Isaiah Berlin be left to the – ‘unfashionable’ – enthusiasms of Our Age? Or consigned to the plaudits that have broken out for his latest volume from the Spectator to the New Statesman? He himself strikes a more modest note ...”

“... less professional status than they can remember having. In the ‘golden age’, as Noel Annan called it, of the Fifties and Sixties, academic salaries were around two and a half times the national average wage. By 1989 the ratio had shrunk to one and a half. The academic salary range (for all but medical faculty) runs from £13,000 to around ...”