LONDON — Which is cooler: To accept a knighthood from the queen, or to turn one down?

In what the BBC is calling the “alternative honors list,” the British government on Friday released the names of 277 people — actors, writers, musicians, politicians, scientists and others — who for reasons known mostly to themselves rejected the rarefied opportunity to become knights, dames and the like between 1951 and 1999.

Included are Roald Dahl, who did not want to receive the Order of the British Empire, or O.B.E., in 1986; Graham Greene, who did not want to be a Commander of the British Empire, or C.B.E., in 1956; and Aldous Huxley, who turned down a knighthood in 1959.

The list, released only after repeated Freedom of Information requests by the BBC, includes only dead nonrecipients and leaves it anyone’s guess as to why they declined their awards. But people who turned down awards in the past have given their reasons as, variously, not believing in the monarchy; not liking the system’s links to the British Empire, when there is no British Empire anymore; being miffed that the honor they are being offered is one of the lower-level ones; and feeling generally opposed to the elitism of the whole thing.

“Surely, there is something unlikable about a person, when old, accepting honors from a institution she attacked when young?” wrote the author Doris Lessing in 1992, turning down the chance to be a dame of what she called the “nonexistent empire” (she accepted another title, the Companion of Honor, in 2000, saying she liked that “you’re not called anything” special.) In 2003, J. G. Ballard said he did not want a C.B.E. because the whole thing was a “preposterous charade.”