Noel Annan
After the war Noel Annan returned to Britain to take up his Fellowship at Cambridge. He was elected Provost of King’s at the age of thirty-nine, then moved to become head of University College, London and was elected the first full-time Vice Chancellor of the University of London. He was chairman of the Trustees of the National Gallery, a Trustee of the British Museum for seventeen years and a dirctor of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, for eleven years. he wrote the ‘Annan Report’ on the future of broadcasting in 1977.
Noel Annan made his name as an historian of ideas with his study of Leslie Stephen which he amplified and republished in 1984. He also wrote a biography of his headmaster, ‘Roxburgh of Stowe’ (1965), and ‘Changing Enemies’ (1995), an account of his time as an intelligence officer in the War Cabinet Offices, and later in Germany. He is perhaps best known for his book about his own generation, ‘Our Age,’ and his often quoted article on ‘’The Intellectual Aristocracy’.’