Noel Annan, Our Age: Portrait of a Generation (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1990).  470 pp., L20.

Arthur Balfour is quoted as saying of Winston Churchill's World Crisis that Winston had written an autobiography and called it a history of the world.  In Our Age: Portrait of a Generation, Lord Annan has written an autobiography and called it a history of his age.  His subject concerns the most influential British thinkers, writers, dons, and civil servants, born around the same time as himself (1916).  That is, those who, between 1945 and Mrs. Thatcher's election in 1979, secured positions from which they could run the country.  Either that, or they influenced and cowed the politicians who were supposed to be running it.

Until Annan began to see some good in Mrs. Thatcher, their beliefs, tastes, and prejudices were his.  This is because he was one of them.  He uses the term "Our Age" throughout.  Our Age did this, Our Age thought that.  He means the few hundred people like himself, at the summit, and the few hundred thousand lower down, perhaps solely consisting of the readers of what John Osborne's Jimmy Porter called the "posh" Sunday newspapers, who approved of what the summiteers were doing.  Lord Annan is too modest to say it, but his autobiography really is a history of his age--or rather, of the people who ended up in charge of his age.  It is like a history of postwar America consisting only of the thoughts and actions of the most vocal people living inside the Beltway and on the island of Manhattan.

The book is therefore the opposite of the history-writing in which Our Age--which hereafter I shall refer to as His Age--supposes itself to believe.  The book is about people--famous people at that.  Yet one of the endless series of fads which influenced His Age was the French annales school of historiography.  Its ideas are the subject of one of Annan's many skillful precis.  In that school, famous people do not seem to be important at all.  History is instead about large numbers of unfamous people whose lives are ruled, not by the famous, but by anonymous forces.  What happened would have happened anyway.  Mercifully, and if Annan is anything to go by, the people comprising His Age turn out to be like most of the rest of us.  Whatever school of historiography they may embrace for public consumption, they think famous people are important and interesting.  They enjoy a good gossip, particularly about other people's sex lives.  Not that the sex lives are always like those of most other people.  Of Lowes Dickinson, the Cambridge Hellenist and advocate of a more rational international order, Annan tells us: "Dickinson's private papers, edited in 1973 by Denis Proctor, the last of his loves, give a moving account of the frustration and anguish of unrequited love, all the more difficult to satisfy physically as he found sexual satisfaction only through being trampled on."  We are meant to think: poor chap!  We are certainly not meant to think that Dickinson's inability to find requited love was because his demands were a little unreasonable.  Annan's Age was sophisticated about these matters.

But, then, Annan himself seems to have been born sophisticated, or was educated that way.  From an upper-middle-class London family, he was sent not to one of the traditionalist public--that is, private--schools such as Eton or Harrow, but to Stowe, which was private but not traditionalist.  Stowe had a famously "enlightened" headmaster, Roxburgh, whose biography Annan was to write.  Roxburgh rejected the team games and heartiness of the rival establishments.  He thought it his duty to "civilize" his charges rather than toughen them or make them into empire builders.  He succeeded in the case of Annan, who must be one of the most civilized men--without the quotation marks and with no pejorative overtones intended--ever to administer universities and sit on committees (the two great activities of Annan's later life).  But for every Annan, the school must have turned out many a know-all and sneerer at the tastes of the bourgeoisie.  If you are told by your headmaster that you are being made civilized, the likelihood is that you will grow up thinking that the rest of your fellow citizens are barbarians who need to be civilized too.

This is the problem about Annan, or rather Annan in relation to His Age: the man is so much better than His Age.  He is at all the good parties in London, Oxford, and Cambridge, as are plenty of His Age.  But the extra expansiveness of his manner suggests that he really wants to know what the other person is thinking across the canape[acu]s and champagne.  He booms, but he also listens.  This willingness to listen to opposing views, unusual among the magnificoes of British social administration, is in a way his weakness.  As we shall see, he is not sure that His Age got it right after all.  He thinks there was some good in Mrs. Thatcher's onslaught on it.  For that reason, his book is regarded by some of London-Oxbridge's more bigoted liberals as having about it an element of the Quisling.

From Stowe, the young Annan read history at King's College, Cambridge, and studied law for a short time.  Then the war came and he was drafted into intelligence.  In a passage in Our Age explaining how it came about that several communist spies, such as Kim Philby, could be employed by British intelligence, he explains: "The truth was that in the hectic days after war was declared there was not much time to vet anyone--certainly not in 1940.  I myself was compulsorily commissioned into the Intelligence Corps because I had admitted to knowing some French and German.  A civilian friend of my father's, who advised Kenneth Strong, the colonel at the head of the German section of intelligence in the War Office, on railway capacities in Europe recommended me to him as someone suitable to monitor German troop movements.  No more bizarre recommendation could have been made, but all through the army in 1940 the ignorant were being told to learn.  No one vetted me and within a week I was piecing together the reports of agents in the Balkans and the early stutterings of Ultra.  [Anthony] Blunt was indeed rejected but in the confusion of 1940 got into MI5."

Actually, Annan reached the heart of British wartime power: the War Cabinet Office.  After the war, he spent a year in Germany with the British Control Commission.  The proximity of the Russians made him one of the earliest liberal Cold Warriors.  He retained an interest in Germany, eventually acquiring a German wife.  He might have noticed that in the decade between 1945 and 1955, West Germany recovered more quickly than Britain, even though it had adopted an economic system rejected by His Age--the free market.  His own country, meanwhile, had adopted the Welfare State which His Age had prescribed without taking the precaution of producing the wealth to pay for it.  But it was a long time--not until Mrs. Thatcher--before anyone of His Age began to display any confidence in capitalism or lack of confidence in the Welfare State.

From Germany, he returned to King's and spent the next twenty years there.  The history of ideas was his subject.  No one in Britain this century had been so good at linking the ideas to the people who held them.  In Leslie Stephen: His Thought and Character in Relation to His Time, he wrote the life of Virginia Woolf's father.  But it is much more than that.  On a smaller scale, this book, together with a later essay on the Victorian intellectual aristocracy, do for Victorian times what Our Age does for Annan's own.

King's was the college of John Maynard Keynes and E.M. Forster, and the postwar Annan--having the requisite charm and advanced views--became part of late Bloomsbury.  He was also popular in his college.  In 1956, though not yet forty, he was elected to provost when the previous incumbent died suddenly.  Thus he joined the administrative wing of His Age.  Unlike most progressive scholars, he was good at running things and a master committee man.  In the early 1960s he thought that the ruling Conservative Party were old-fashioned Tories, that the country was riddled by class consciousness, that the universities should teach more science, and that there was much sexual repression.  (For some inexplicable reason, such is the nature of political packages, the sort of people who thought the country did not spend enough on scientific education also tended to think that it should reform the laws on homosexuality, abortion, and theatrical censorship.)  Annan's were the views of elite educational administrators.  The Northern, classless, meritocrat Harold Wilson played on such feelings--except those concerning sexual liberation, in which he had no interest--in order to receive the endorsement of Annan's Age as the candidate of the advanced and the educated, an endorsement which did not long survive Wilson's accession to power.