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“... Benson resembles a large tabby which stalks round the house switching its tail, delicately sniffing this, softly circling round that; every so often a paw is extended to pluck gently at a human being who has crossed its path – as if to explore what kind of a creature this intruder might be and whether he likes cats. Then suddenly the claws show, the paw strikes and the claws retract leaving beads of blood on the skin ...”

“... Investigative journalism has many triumphs to its credit. It toppled a President of the United States. It has exposed, through the hard leg-work of tiny teams of sleuths, the evasions of corporations, ministries, crooks in local government, and the common shysters whose trickery Esther Rantzen mocks in tones of cloying surprise. The press are right to blow fanfares in their own praise because investigative journalism is precisely the sort of activity which those who sneer at the free press want to muzzle in the interest of ‘objectivity’ and ‘responsible’ journalism ...”

“... No wonder people think of the secret services as farce or fiction. What is one to make of an organisation whose leaders have names like Dummy Oliver, Blinker Hall, Biffy Dunderdale, Lousy Payne, Buster Milmo, Pay Sykes, Tar Robertson, Barmy Russel and Quex Sinclair (not to be confused with his successor but one, Sinbad Sinclair)? It’s no good reassuring the reader that in the transition from Victorian days, when men called even their closest friends by their surnames, to the present time, when not to know the first name of a casual acquaintance makes it almost impossible to address him without appearing pompous or supercilious, nicknames like Stubby, Toby or Tubby came to be used as a gesture to informality, particularly in the Army and Navy ...”

“... There are at least three books at present being written on Anthony Blunt and the Cambridge Spies. Already the sleuths are nosing out the Fifth Man – the master control, an older don who must have recruited them. In 1977 the Times proclaimed to a sceptical public that he was Donald Beves, the delightful tutor of King’s known to generations of undergraduates who performed on stage in the ADC, the Marlowe or the Musical Society, and whose interest in politics or indeed in ideas was negligible: clearly his bonhomie disguised an Iago ...”

“... World War needs to be supplemented with the personal memoirs of those closely involved, and Noel Annan appears well suited to the task. In 1941 he joined the Military Intelligence Division of the War Office, and worked in section MI14, which was the German department. In 1943 he was promoted to be War Office representative on the Joint Intelligence Staff at ...”

“... 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 came of age between the two world wars and so (as the book’s subtitle claimed) ‘made postwar Britain’. Here he reflected on their social connections, their shifting political and intellectual priorities, their sexual preferences, and their apparently glittering careers ...”

“... of the former secretary-general for public devotion. Here The Best Intentions is unbeatable. Kofi Annan, Traub writes, is ‘the gentle, kindly African with the silver goatee and the rueful, yellowing eyes’, ‘the UN official non-pareil’, ‘perhaps the most popular figure ever to occupy the office’, embodying ‘modest charm and moral ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 best ...”

“... the preparations for extermination went ahead. Yet a third African occupied a key position: Kofi Annan, Under-Secretary-General and head of the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations. When Dallaire cabled Annan to tell him that secret weapons dumps were being set up, Annan quickly ...”

“... view to a settlement. This was then rubber-stamped by the Security Council, formally putting Kofi Annan in charge of the process. Naturally – he owed his appointment to Washington – Annan was, as Hannay puts it, ‘aware of the need for the UN to co-operate as closely as possible with the US and the UK in the ...”

“... to America’s ‘legal black hole’ in Cuba to realise how unlikely a prospect that is. Kofi Annan has recently been pressing for a much more significant role for the UN in Iraq. Blue-helmeted troops could make a significant contribution to bringing peace to the country; they could at least provide essential security to international ...”

“... In little more than a decade, the UN has acquired an unprecedented global prominence. Kofi Annan’s career, as described by James Traub in The Best Intentions: Kofi Annan and the UN in the Era of American Power, illustrates the possibilities and the pitfalls of this new world role. Having risen through the ranks to ...”

“... 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 ...”