The End of the English Cultural Elite?

Abstract

First paragraph: In his autobiography, Our Age (1990) Lord Noel Annan, the distinguished Cambridge don, intellectual historian, first Vice-Chancellor of the University of London, and leading cultural broker between the 1950s and the 1970s, offered a heartfelt and emotional account of the rise and fall of the intellectual and cultural elite, a group with which he claims affinity. Drawing on his research on the rise of intermarriage and family connections amongst Oxbridge dons from the later 19th century (reprinted in Annan, 1999), he argues that in the immediate post war years, this intellectual and social elite came to dominate its age. The expansion of universities, the success of the BBC, the effective deployment of state funding for the arts and culture, and the deference of government and public opinion, led him to define the cultural elite as the Generation that Made Post-War Britain.