Obituaries - March 10, 2000

Noel Annan; British Intellectual, Reformer

Noel Annan, 83, leading British intellectual, historian and higher education reformer. Annan was a multifaceted Englishman who was best known for his 1990 book, “Our Age: English Intellectuals Between the World Wars--A Group Portrait.” The latter was a magisterial survey of the cultural and political influence of the generation that came out of Oxford and Cambridge between 1919 and 1951 and shaped postwar Britain, including E.M. Forster and John Maynard Keynes. As provost of King’s College, Cambridge, and later vice chancellor of London University, he was seen as a charismatic leader and advocate of broadening curricula, improving teaching and expanding student freedoms. He was the author of several other books, including a biography of Leslie Stephen, the literary critic and editor of the Dictionary of Literary Biography who also was Virginia Woolf’s father, and “Changing Enemies: the Defeat and Regeneration of Germany,” a memoir of his years as an intelligence officer during World War II. He was a critic who wrote extensively for the New York Review of Books. Lord Annan was given life peerage by Prime Minister Harold Wilson in 1965. On Feb. 21 in London.