Memorial Service: Professor Norman Stone
At St Martin-in-the-fields, Trafalgar Square, novelist Robert Harris paid tribute to Norman Stone by revealing he’d based the hungover, brilliant don in his 1998 novel, Archangel, on the historian.
‘A lesser man might have sued me,’ says Harris, who compared Professor Stone to a ‘battered Byron’. ‘But Norman liked a joke. And he liked even more that he was played by Daniel Craig.’
Colleagues and pupils remembered Stone, Professor of Modern History at Oxford, Professor of European History at Bilkent (Turkey) and lecturer at Cambridge.
Historian Andrew Roberts, a former pupil, said Stone was ‘the most influential historian in the half-century since A J P Taylor’, while recalling Cambridge tutorials fuelled by ‘two vast whiskies’, occasionally conducted at whisper level. ‘Hangovers can last till noon,’ said Stone. Roberts credited him for ‘inspiring me with a love of history’. Timothy Garton Ash, Professor of European Studies at Oxford, remembered Stone’s instrumental effect on Margaret Thatcher’s views on German reunification at a Chequers meeting in 1990. After hearing Stone’s pro-unification advice, Thatcher said, ‘I’ve got the message. I’ll be very nice to the Germans.’
Michael Gove read Charles Mackay’s No Enemies: ‘You have no enemies, you say? Alas, my friend, the boast is poor.’
The Marquess of Salisbury imitated
Stone’s most dismissive gesture – ‘Tongue out, shrugging his shoulders, spreading out his hands’ – reserved for bureaucrats, panjandrums of AustroHungarian Europe and mindless, pompous figures in general.
Rupert Stone, one of Professor Stone’s sons, remembered his father’s childlike, malice-free, magical personality, which he compared to the qualities of Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up. He quoted his father’s own view of himself as a ‘goofy Enlightenment optimist’ with ‘the willpower of a prawn in a tsunami’.
The Reverend Dr Sam Wells presided. St Martin’s Voices sang Bach’s Magnificat and his Mass in B Minor and Rachmaninov’s Great Ektene. HARRY MOUNT