342 In October 1940, the long-time president of the League of Nations’ International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (CICI), retired Oxford professor Gilbert Murray, was contending with the rigours and limitations of living in a country at war, while at the same time attempting to rally colleagues and political exiles in England to action, in defence of intellectual cooperation and education. Henri Bon- net, French diplomat and long-time director of the League of Nations’ International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (IICI), had closed down the Institute and escaped his native France in June 1940. Soon after, he found himself in the United States, absorbed by his work for de Gaulle’s Free France. Gonzague de Reynold, the conservative Swiss who had acted as vice-president of the CICI was gloomy – if comfortable – in his residence in Switzerland, his main concern being to keep his country out of the war. The three were the highest ranked officials of the League’s Intellectual Cooperation Organisation, yet contact between them had broken off. By the fall of 1940, the League’s grandiose buildings in Geneva were almost empty, with a skeleton staff attending to the dwindling business of the organisation and attempting to demonstrate its continued usefulness. One year of war had already managed to fray the transnational networks of the organisations of intellectual cooperation that the League had built since 1922. But in the midst of the brutal war, activities and, crucially, the planning for intellectual cooperation in the post-war period resumed, even if it was in fits and starts, in different places, with shifting networks and allegiances. This article inserts itself into the recent re-evaluation of the League of Nations, which has stressed the important role its technical organisations have played, also in shaping the post-war international order. Not impressed by the vociferous claims that the United Nations system started from a clean slate and marked a «new begin- ning» after the failure of the League of Nations, many scholars are starting to emphasise the connections – ideologically as well as institutionally – between pre- and post-war organisations. 1 A few League organisations, such as the ILO or the Economic and Financial Organisation, had found refuge in North America and Corinne A. Pernet Twists, Turns and Dead Alleys: The League of Nations and Intellectual Cooperation in Times of War