It is true that in the most hallowed and ancient of our institutions of higher education, still whispering the last enchantments of the Middle Ages, … - Noel Annan, Baron Annan

Oxford, Cambridge and the other elite universities are the guardians of intellectual life. They cannot teach the qualities that people need in politics and business. Nor can they teach culture and wisdom, any more than theologians teach holiness, philosophers goodness or sociologists a blueprint for the future. They exist to cultivate the intellect. All else is secondary.

The profound emotional impact of the horror and slaughter convinced many that the values which had held good before the war must now, by definition, be wrong—if indeed they were not responsible for causing the war. A society which permitted such a catastrophe to occur must be destroyed, because the pre-suppositions of that comfortable pre-war England were manifestly false. Searching for a new way in which to regard conduct, the ’twenties came to see it through the eyes either of Mrs. Webb or of Mrs. Woolf.

Journalists who sneered at the incompetence of the intelligence services, and jeered that the Establishment was only interested in protecting its own, never considered that the rule of law is something that protects us all. That is the price one pays to live in an open society.