Noel Annan, Baron Annan

Noel Gilroy Annan, Baron Annan OBE (25 December 1916 – 21 February 2000) was a British military intelligence officer, author, and academic. During his military career, he rose to the rank of colonel and was appointed to the Order of the British Empire as an Officer (OBE). He was provost of King's College, Cambridge, 1956–66, provost of University College London, 1966–78, vice-chancellor of the University of London, and a member of the House of Lords.

Annan's publications include Leslie Stephen (1951)—awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Roxburgh of Stowe (1965), Our Age (1990), described by Professor John Gray in the New Statesman as a "marvellous compendium of the higher gossip", Changing Enemies (1995), and The Dons (1999). His best-known essay is "The Intellectual Aristocracy", which illustrates, according to Robert Fulford in the National Post, the "web of kinship that united British intellectuals (the Darwins, Huxleys, Macaulays, etc.) in the 19th and early 20th centuries."

Early life and education Annan was born in Gloucester Terrace, London, and was educated at St. Winnifred's School, Seaford in East Sussex, and Stowe School. At Stowe, he was head of Temple House, and editor of the school newspaper The Stoic. He went up to King's College, Cambridge,

Military career In October 1940, he entered officer cadet training, and in January 1941 was commissioned in the Intelligence Corps and posted to MI14, a department of the War Office, where "Annan was given an important job in operational intelligence studying the movement by rail of German forces".

Academic career Annan returned to King's in 1946, where he had been elected to a fellowship in absentia in 1944 at the unusually young age of 28.

He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1974. Essex University awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1967. He was also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Committees He acted as a trustee of the British Museum 1963–1980, and of the National Gallery 1978–85. He also chaired the Royal Commission on Broadcasting, which concluded in 1977 (see Annan Committee). He was the first chairman of the Trustee's education committee at Churchill College, Cambridge.