Such, Such Was the Sprezzatura.

Susan Pedersen’s LRB review (24 September 2026; archived) of Twilight of the Dons: British Intellectuals from World War Two to Thatcherism by Colin Kidd combines snarkiness with imperturbability in a way that is pleasing to me; it doesn’t hurt that I agree with both her premises and her line of argument. She starts off with Noël Annan’s Our Age, an apologia for “those members of his generation who, as he put it, ‘make their times significant and form opinion’” and continues: Annan perfectly embodied his caste: in the intelligence service during the war, a colonel at 29, provost of King’s College, Cambridge at 39, a life peer at 48, and a sought-after committee man and admired writer and commentator throughout. Understandably, he features as exhibit A in Colin Kidd’s new book on postwar British intellectuals. But Kidd hasn’t just used Annan as an exemplar; he echoes Annan’s periodisation, framework, definitions and, to a degree, his argument. Like Annan, Kidd elides ‘British’ with…