People From London

"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.""

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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.""

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"[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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"This institution... with rules and constitutions under the authority of the Holy See, has for its special object the domestic and industrial training of girls (chiefly of the working class) with the view to promote peace and happiness in families, in union with and in imitation of the Holy Family of Nazareth."

"We love our neighbour because of the image of God in them, and as able to be our associates in beatitude. Sinners and our enemies therefore may not be excluded from this common love, or from the ordinary exterior marks of it, and we must be prepared to show them more special love when necessary."

"There are two sides to every question. There are two sides to every —what is termed the ' back ' and the ' front of the house,' or more generally known as ' before and behind the footlights '—and if of late years both sides of the curtain have been made familiar to the public gaze, it is not because it is the fashion to court observation, but on account of a passionate national curiosity to know the truth."

"... for sheer beauty, the , to my mind, between and , are infinitely more exquisite, with alternating well-watered s and and in the distance, than any part of ."

"... People still talk of Gertrude Kingston's as a piece of acting to treasure in the memory; and readers of who considered it contained a too great monotony of sorrow to be effective on the stage, found themselves, to their astonishment, almost unendurably moved."

"We didn't know who she was when we started the series. John Howard Davies cast her and we all liked her, so from then on, we used her for all but the more upper-class roles. We simply liked what she did; she was very easy to get along with, she could be very silly when required and she didn't have an excessive sense of dignity."

"One day, when we were doing a read-through, the boys realised they had forgotten to cast another male to be in a jungle sketch. Rather than make an urgent phone call, Michael suggested that I do it instead. It turned out to be one of my most enjoyable sketches, because it was so silly! I'm dressed exactly as they are, in khaki shorts and a pith helmet, with a huge moustache and speaking in a very low gravelly voice. There was no disguising I'm a female though, as I still have my lipstick and false eyelashes on. After that they often put me in men's roles!"

"… I had to read [the script for the first episode of Flying Circus] several times in order to try and make some sense of it. The sketches ended strangely or sometimes didn't seem to end at all! Others had an odd beginning too. It certainly wasn't the sort of humour I was used to and I wasn't quite sure what to make of it all."

"Carol … was the unsung heroine because she was so spot on. We never had to tell her how to play a scene, she just had a Python way of thinking about it."

"I was a great Lucille Ball fan. I did actually want to be Lucille Ball. Or Marilyn Monroe. I didn't care which."

"When [the Pythons] discovered that I had a flair for comedy, the roles got more interesting. Michael … was always the one [to recommend me]; I think if it hadn't been for Michael, I probably always would have just been the glamour stooge."

"The... glimpses we have...of Hindus slain for disputing with Muhammadans , of general prohibitions against processions, worship and ablutions and of other intolerant measures, of idols mutilated, of temples razed, of forcible conversions and marriages, of proscriptions and confiscations, of murders and massacres, and of the sensibility and drunkenness of the tyrants who enjoined them, show us that this picture is not overcharged."

"(to silent Partner). "Pray! have you no conversation?""

". "So, you're going to marry old Mrs. . Well, I think you're a dooced lucky fellah!" . "By Jove, I don't think the luck is all on my side! If she finds money, hang it, I find blood and—haw—beauty!""

"When between six and seven years of age, some of Leech's drawings were seen by the great , and, after carefully looking at them and the boy, he said, 'That boy must be an artist; he will be nothing else or less.' This was said in full consciousness of what is involved in advising such a step. His father wisely, doubtless, thought otherwise, and put him to the medical profession at , under Mr. . He was very near being sent to Edinburgh, and apprenticed to Sir ."

". "I think, sir, if you would be so good as to go first, and break the top rail, my pony would get over.""

"... His stay of nine years at never brought him nearer to the top of the school than the fifth form — the forms being at that time counted downwards, not upwards, as now. He had as a fellow-pupil the famous William Makepeace Thackeray, with whom he formed a friendship that ripened day by day, and never ceased until death parted them. It is said that Leech once had the intense happiness of hearing that when Thackeray was asked to name his dearest friend, he replied, after a few moments' thought, "John Leech.""

"A man of grave and almost melancholy cast of countenance, handsome withal, was ; quiet, reserved, and gentlemanly in manner, a hearty hater of posing, and noise, and publicity. Save at the weekly dinner, he consorted but little with his colleagues on Punch, with the exception of Thackeray: he was intimate, at one time, with Dickens, to whom he gave a walking-stick inscribed "C. D., from J. L.," which Dickens often carried; with , with Mowbray Morris, and with . He and had been fellow medical students at the Hospital, fellow assistants to that general practitioner who figures in Ledbury as "Mr. Rawkins,” but in later life there was not much in common between them. I fear Albert was a little too rowdy for Leech."

"I wasn’t God’s first choice for what I’ve done for China. ... I don’t know who it was... . It must have been a man... a well-educated man. I don’t know what happened. Perhaps he died. Perhaps he wasn’t willing . .. And God looked down... and saw Gladys Aylward ... And God said— “Well, she’s willing!”"

"That, let us rail at women, scorn and flout 'em, We may live with, but cannot live without 'em."

"Speaking about how his passion for animals was born, Nutkins would bunk off school and then climb over the fence of . The keepers took him under their wing and allowed him to muck out the elephant enclosure."

"You’re talking about with all animals. And it’s body language with all human beings as well. If you watch very carefully the body language of an animal — get to know it — that is the first phase of respecting that animal."

"In the post- era, an air of unease hangs over aspects of ’s life; while in Sandaig he hired two adolescent assistants – Terry Nutkins (who went on to become a well-known TV naturalist) and Jimmy Watt – to help look after the otters. Both under-age, they moved into his home and he became Nutkins’ legal guardian. It was a set-up discomfiting to modern sensibilities, though no allegations have ever been made against Maxwell and those who knew him best believe his desire to be around young boys was merely a product of his stunted emotional development."

"Maxwell became Nutkins's legal guardian. It was while living with him in the remote hamlet of Sandaig, western Scotland, that the young Nutkins was bitten by one of Maxwell's pet otters, losing the tips of two of his fingers as a result. This might have put off many young naturalists from a career with animals altogether, but , who first met Nutkins at Maxwell's home in the early 1960s, recalls a very different reaction: "He treated the injury like a war wound – he would hold his hand up and tell the story to impress people, almost as a badge of honour.""

"The times that I got to know really well were the times that I was alone with him at . And that Jimmy Watt, the other keeper, went on holiday. And sometimes on these dark winter nights, when you had this really strong wind blowing outside and the hiss of the s … Gavin drank a substantial amount of whiskey … and he did ramble on somewhat. And he told the most wonderful stories sometimes."

"... Gemini was abandoned by her mother and I had to her. Well, I had a choice — either I hand-reared her or else she died. And that was a year ago now. And Gemini now is on the northwest coast of Scotland, and what I want to do is introduce her to the sea. And what I would like eventually is for Gemini to get her own food — get her own fish — to swim freely in the ocean and come back when she wants to."

"All this is going on under a rush mat shelter with a table where I write at 11.00 on Sunday morning with lots of cicadas grinding away and Joan's voice up above calling to her cats — two different sets of kittens, with their clans, who are not allowed to meet, so the house is sundered by a sort of cats' Berlin Wall, dividing the house into two mews flats, as Johnny C[raxton] (or I) might say."