University Of Cambridge Alumni

"National culture may some day give place to cosmopolitan culture, but meantime it is a richer and intenser thing. The poetry of a nation, for instance, gains more from the deep roots of national memory and tradition than it loses from the political boundaries which fence it from the air and sun that might come to it across neighbouring gardens. The whole gains by the fuller development of every one of its parts."

"The landlords' land was seized in in the summer of 1917—that is, during the , and before the Communists came into power. I was told afterwards that by October of that year there was a single great estate left in the But it appears that the formal allocation of the land did not take place until after the . With the land, the stock and implements (inventar) were distributed also."

"Greek and Roman religion depended on images, quite literally: there were no sacred laws or scripture and certainly no organised church or priesthood to police practice and correct error. It was in their images and their names that the gods persisted for at least two thousand years from the Bronze Age to the purges organised by monotheist emperors."

"Q. If a hog is decided to be in the right, what is the consequence? A. He is almost ruined. Q. If in the wrong what? A. He is quite ruined."

"One fallacy is that International Law has no existence whatever, and is a mere fiction of the political imagination. This assertion is usually made by those who, either for some particular argumentative purpose wish to prove it a fiction, or, by their own criminal acts, have already done that was in their power to render it such. It is no doubt perfectly true that the body of International Law is at present very imperfectly developed. Many of the rules which compose it are uncertain, ambiguous, or habitually interpreted in the most opposite senses. There are many doctrines which have the feeblest possible hold even upon the States which formally recognise them. There are other doctrines of the highest importance which, though very widely received and conformed to, are still frequently set at nought with utter impunity. But all this vacillation and uncertainty, taken by itself, gives the most incorrect picture of the practical cogency of the great mass of the Rules which compose the International Law of Europe."

"It is well known that up to the time of Bentham the law of England, and more especially the most antiquated portions of it, or the "," was obsequiously venerated on all side, by judges, practising lawyers, legislators, and the general public, as the "perfection of human reason." If such a view seemed to shock common sense, when brought into glaring contrast with the actual anomalies, contradictions, barbarities, and irrational formalities which characterized every portion of the , the difficulty was got over by ascribing all that was reasonable and precise to the Law, and all that was necessarily repugnant even to the acclimatized temperament of legal practitioners, to false interpretations of it."

"... in Justinian's time, the Roman language of law, though debased—as is clearly shown by comparing the terms of any passage of Gaius' Institutes with the terms of the amending passage in Justinian's Institutes—was still equal to its purpose, and was intelligible throughout the bulk of the populations affected by the law. The intensely centralized administration and the current system of judicial procedure and appeals tended to keep the Latin tongue, if not everywhere a vulgar dialect, at all events a necessary accomplishment for all aspirants to office. At the same time the Greek language, which, in Constantinople and all the chief ports of Asia Minor, in Greece itself, in Syria, and in Alexandria, was the language of the market-place, the exchange, and, as it would seem, the polite coterie, afforded a secondary vehicle for the diffusion of Justinian's laws."

"Throughout the long years of his retirement, Noël Annan maintained a reputation as one of the most controversial academics of his time... he was a man with whom it was notoriously imprudent to tangle, particularly in the correspondence column."

"A cigarette that bears a lipstick's traces, An airline ticket to romantic places, And still my heart has wings These foolish things remind me of you."

"That certain night, the night we met, There was magic abroad in the air, There were angels dining at the Ritz And a nightingale sang in Berkeley Square."

"Our Age by Noël Annan...is a personal portrait of his generation by one of the most enigmatic people of the period, a maverick at work in the corridors of power. This is a superb performance, wily, trenchant and amusing."

"In the 19th century the dons of Oxford and Cambridge emerged as a distinct social class, with their own peculiar and privileged way of life, mysterious to the outside world.... Noel Annan, who died in March at the age of 83, spent more than half a century living this life and writing about it. His last book, The Dons: Mentors, Eccentrics, and Geniuses (University of Chicago Press), is an affectionate elegy for a class that has largely expired."

"[That] marvellous compendium of the higher gossip, Our Age."

"Thanks to two remarkable talks by Mr. Noël Annan on the B.B.C. three years ago, and to my own experience, I am more in sympathy with Kipling's philosophy now than ever I was in childhood or early manhood."

"He is a fine, red-faced man with Corinthian features and a proconsular manner. He is very good at stimulating passion and fury and uses it, like his language, as a pawn in the game of committeemanship."

"Annan's eye is beadier than anyone's one knows. As a child of Bloomsbury, he describes its cottage culture with an intimate acerbity... Annan acknowledges that it was from Bloosmbury that Our Age learned the lesson that the conquest of jealously is the mark of civilised behaviour, a maxim as hard for the inamorati of the Annan generation as it was for those of Bloomsbury."

"When I was at Cambridge just after the war, one of my lecturers was Noel Annan. He was shortly to become, at 39, the youngest ever Provost of King's College. His subject was "Social and Political Thought in the 19th Century". After four years of intellectual stultification in the Army (working briefly in a similar branch of intelligence to Lieutenant-Colonel Annan), I found his course just too packed with ideas, and gave it up — to my eternal regret. The same kind of brilliant compression and synthesis, distinguishes his latest book."

"But there has always been another side to him; the high Victorian, Leslie Stephen side, Stephen being the subject of a brilliant biography he penned after the war. Lord Annan is a great believer in the essentially Victorian concept of the public authority, set up to protect and insulate areas of vital public interest from direct political interference."

"Noël Annan himself, who in Who's Who’s most stylish entry, defines his recreation as "writing English prose", and this book, a prize example of literary gamesmanship, reminds one marvellously of what English prose is like."

"Universities should hold up for admiration the intellectual life. For the most precious gift they have to offer is to live and work among books or in laboratories."

"It was right 25 years ago to expand higher education. It was wrong to think it could all be Rolls-Royce education. It was wrong to insist on parity of esteem between university and university and between universities and polytechnics."

"Professor Scruton should — from time to time — try to take the advice Keats gave to his brother. "The only way of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing — to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts, not a select party.""

"The diminished respect for authority brought about by the spread of egalitarianism, the multiplicity of choice and styles of life which greater affluence has made possible, the belief in the value of modernity, and the expansion of curiosity and interest, these seem to me to be the main forces which have disintegrated the old cultural pattern."

"The profound emotional impact of the horror and slaughter convinced many that the values which had held good before the war must now, by definition, be wrong—if indeed they were not responsible for causing the war. A society which permitted such a catastrophe to occur must be destroyed, because the pre-suppositions of that comfortable pre-war England were manifestly false. Searching for a new way in which to regard conduct, the ’twenties came to see it through the eyes either of Mrs. Webb or of Mrs. Woolf."

"The faith of the ’twenties lay not in political machinery but in education and in psycho-analysis: not in votes for women, but in freedom for women. This was the romanticism of a generation affecting to despise the romantic! What is more romantic than to see the eventual triumph of reason, the conquest by the social sciences of misery and evil, the revolution in morals as the panacea to cure the world?"

"It is true that in the most hallowed and ancient of our institutions of higher education, still whispering the last enchantments of the Middle Ages, it can be asserted that the best that has been thought and said must inevitably and inescapably be handcuffed to the study of the Anglo-Saxon. Still there has been a change."

"Journalists who sneered at the incompetence of the intelligence services, and jeered that the Establishment was only interested in protecting its own, never considered that the rule of law is something that protects us all. That is the price one pays to live in an open society."

"If, sir, I possessed, as you suggest, the power of conveying unlimited sexual attraction through the potency of my voice, I would not be reduced to accepting a miserable pittance from the BBC for interviewing a faded female in a damp basement."

"Before he could go to New York he had to get a U.S. visa at the American consulate in Toronto. He was called upon to fill in a long form with many questions, including "Is it your intention to overthrow the Government of the United States by force?" By the time Harding got to that one he was so irritated that he answered: "Sole purpose of visit.""

"Mr Grade is a brilliant television mogul, but on this occasion he has used the language of an insolent jackanapes. He cannot possibly "respect and support" ITC's authority. If he did he would at once apologise and promise not to commission a further series [of The Word]. The ITC was set up by Parliament to safeguard the public against gross breaches of taste, and he is lucky to escape from the infliction of a swingeing fine. Does Mr Grade expect us to believe the media-speak twaddle about "independent research"? Or does he think we are all so ignorant as to believe that all moral judgments are "subjective" and by implication worthless? Clearly his mind needs stretching by a few elementary textbooks on ethics which will enable him to realise that Channel 4 should not celebrate moronic presenters of programmes for sniggering schoolchildren."

"Nostalgia, however, is the mother of loyalty."

"Noel Annan captures the last generation's spirit in his wide-ranging, superficial but annoyingly perceptive book Our Age. This was the ethic of the inheriting classes, the public school and Oxbridge intelligentsia and Civil Service élite. Its members staffed the bureaucracies and the media, devised the welfare state, dismembered the Empire, and sanctioned the plural society. They called themselves the great and good."

"Oxford, Cambridge and the other elite universities are the guardians of intellectual life. They cannot teach the qualities that people need in politics and business. Nor can they teach culture and wisdom, any more than theologians teach holiness, philosophers goodness or sociologists a blueprint for the future. They exist to cultivate the intellect. All else is secondary."

"So much has been said by Forster himself in the Life about the dramatic performances in aid of the comparatively short-lived , that to do more than touch upon it here would be superfluous. Of course its real founder was Dickens himself, seconded, though I fancy with not quite so much enthusiasm, by , Forster, Mr. (afterwards Sir) , , , , and many others in the world of Literature and Art."

"It was Forster who suggested that should die. Dickens took this and ran with it — he thought it was brilliant."

"By 1831, when Forster was 18 and Lamb 55, they had met and become friends. Lamb was then living in retirement at as a distinguished literary man. Like Leigh Hunt he would have attracted Forster because of his links with the recent and glamorous past, for Lamb had known the young Wordsworth, had known Southey and Hazlitt; Coleridge had been his 'fifty years old friend without a dissension'. ... He was a fine critic and a great essayist. His sister was a lunatic and he himself a saddened, garrulous, humorous, and gregarious bachelor who often drank too much. Drinking and gregarious gossiping suited the young Forster, and Forster suited Lamb, who treated him with a mixture of patronage, affection and reliance."

"... It is the fact that teaches, and not any sermonizing drawn from it. Oliver Twist is the history of a child born in a and brought up by overseers, and there is nothing introduced that is out of keeping with the design."

"... If to owe nothing to other men is to be original, a more original man than Swift never lived; but, with the wonderful subtlety of thought so rarely joined to the same robustness of intellect which placed his wit and philosophy on the level of Rabelais, he had the same habit as the great Frenchman of turning things inside out, and putting away decencies as if they were shows or hypocrisies. In both it led to an insufferable coarseness."

", whose life and adventures should be known to all who know his writings, must be held to have succeeded in nothing that his friends would have had him succeed in. He was intended for a clergyman, and was rejected when he applied for orders; he practiced as a physician, and never made what would have paid for a degree; what he was not asked or expected to do, was to write, but he wrote and paid the penalty. His existence was a continued privation. The days were few, in which he had resources for the night, or dared to look forward to the morrow."

"... No one conversant with can have failed to be struck by the extraordinary lawlessness that prevailed at sea. The coasts for the most part were without watch or defence. The dissolute extravagance of the court took no heed of the subject's claim to protection; and if a needy lord could fill his spendthrift purse for a day by help of a maritime freebooter, the honest merchant was helpless against the plunderer and pirate. As a consequence, the coasts swarmed with such; but of all who had so obtained infamous distinction, the most notorious was Captain . This man had possessed himself of several pirate ships,and no point along the Irish or western sea was safe from his attacks."

"With an English degree I found literary work, in publishing, mostly reading manuscripts, then in reviewing, occasional broadcasting and literary editing. Only in the early 1970s, as I approached forty, did I start working on my first , but I still had to earn my living by working as a literary editor. It was 1986 and I was in my mid-fifties before I could concentrate on full-time research and writing. I found great happiness in this work, and for the next twenty-five years I researched and wrote steadily. So at last I found my true vocation."

"Many changes within human beings, such as offer the most interesting themes, are inevitably hidden and silent, or too gradual for drama. 'To penetrate deeply into the human consciousness is the glory of the philosopher, the moralist, the , and, to a certain degree, even of the lyric poet', but the capacity to do so is not enough to make a dramatist."

"Tomalin herself examines the with the confident judgments of a , not the hedged and sometimes overawed appraisals of a scholar. Appreciative of Hardy’s genius, she still finds his body of fiction “exceptionally uneven.” “,” the novel that made him rich, remains by Tomalin’s measure an awkward production in spots, and yet it “glows with the intensity” of Hardy’s imagination."

"... the has to tell his story entirely in the present tense. We must allow him a certain license in foreshortening changes in human beings which in order to be true to life require the passage of time."

"has never been a spiritual home to me; but let me add that I have not got one, although at Cambridge for a few years I fancied that I had. 'Bloomsbury' had been to me, rather, what those who cater for sailors (like their, my home is a floating one) call 'a home from home'. Looking back I see that I converged upon 'Bloomsbury' by three ways: through making friends with , through getting to know some junior to me, and through my introduction into the home-life of and ."

"Judged by the influence upon men's minds alone, the writings which Leslie Stephen collected in Essays on Free-thinking and Plain-speaking (1873), and in An Agnostic's Apology (1893) (most of the latter written much earlier), must be considered the most important part of his life's work. One reason why, as we shall be presently reminded, he wrote disparagingly of literary criticism, was that it seemed so trivial compared with criticism of thought and religion. What if he had induced some readers to take a clearer view of the merits and limitations of Fielding or De Quincey, or if he had succeeded in giving a tolerably true account of some man's life? Of what importance was that compared with helping men to a truer conception of the nature of things, or with the work of a man of science?"

"s for girls were not hard to find in the 1780s, not least because keeping a school was one of the very few ways in which a woman could hope to earn a respectable living, but accounts of what went on in them make depressing, and sometimes horrifying, reading."

"Of ancient stringed instruments there are, we may roughly say, two broad types; in one the strings are stretched across a sound-box and lie parallel to it—this we may call the ‘’ type, though including, for our present purpose, the various forms of and ; in the other the strings are attached to the upper board of the sound-box and rise vertically from it—this is the ‘harp’ type."

"Sir (Ur Excavations, vol. , 1934) records that in the grave of the (c. 2700 ) he notices close to the coffin a quantity of small "" of thin cope sheeting, laid over wooden cores; with them there were plentiful traces of wood and also of some substance which looked like leather or skin; he suggests that they formed the remains of a drum."

"... The is best known for his reporting of the national disasters that struck England while he was keeping it: the , the , the . The record of these and other public events is used by historians and read with enjoyment by schoolchildren, because his reporter's eye was as keenly trained on them as it was on his private experience. What he was doing in such reporting was more significant than may appear at first glance, because the censorship imposed by the government of ensured that there no newspapers at this period except for a single government-controlled information sheet, the '. It meant that no proper record of public events was being kept, and even parliamentary debates were not allowed to be reported. ... As well as being a diarist, Pepys is regarded as one of the most important naval administrators in England's history. He rose to a position of eminence and power and was proud of his work in organizing, disciplining and developing the navy, and in insisting that shipbuilding must be properly funded. Those who most admire the administrator are sometimes ambivalent about the Diary."