I have been thinking about William Whyte’s paper about Noel Annan which adopted an idea from a critical review of Annan’s Our Age by Stefan Collini that there were two Noel Annans:  the real Noel Annan who was an intellectual, the author of a study of Leslie Stephen and an influential essay on the Intellectual Aristocracy in J. H. Plumb’s festschrift for G. M. Trevelyan; and Lord Annan, the academic bureaucrat.

I think Annan was a very obvious product of King’s College, Cambridge in the mid-1930s where he became an Apostle and friend and protégé of Maynard Keynes and Dadie Rylands.  He probably always thought, as does Collini, that the life of the mind was superior to the life of action – or as King’s always calls it, the life of administration, a clear put-down of professional administrators, as Annan became.  But is it really better to remain a Don and retain the purity of the academic life than to go out into the world and run things which was a theme of the conference ?

I think I remember two things that Annan said: that no-one ever got thanked for being on a committee; but that it was important to learn how to exercise power through committees, which is indicative of his attitude towards his life as a committee-man.

Anyway, he arranged for his funeral to be held in King’s College, Cambridge, an indication that he wanted to be received back into the monastery.