Norman's wisdom: the brilliance of the late historian Norman Stone
Historian Norman Stone was a planet-brained teacher. Harry Mount recalls uplifting, wine-fuelled tutorials with the singing professor
You never forget a good teacher, the old saying goes. But what makes a good teacher? They’re hard to define; easier to point out. I would point to Professor Norman Stone, the historian who died in Budapest in June, aged 78. He was an understandably controversial figure – having advised Margaret Thatcher on her Germany policy, and having written for Rupert Murdoch’s papers.
It was controversial, too, that, among the mourners at Stone’s funeral in an imposing Lutheran church in central Budapest, was Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s Right-wing Prime Minister.
Norman’s critics – and there are many – would pounce on Orbán as evidence of his own supposed unforgivable politics. I think the more striking thing is that Orbán, like so many of the funeral’s congregation, was a former student of Norman’s. He’d been taught by him at Oxford in the late Eighties before the end of Communism in Hungary.
Norman said, with his customary modesty, ‘I didn’t teach him much. Somebody told me there was this bright young Hungarian – so I went and talked to him a bit in Gee’s [a restaurant in north Oxford].’
That was how Norman taught – not in formal tutorials, but in restaurants and pubs. When I was at Oxford in the early Nineties, I wasn’t ever strictly taught by him. But I played bridge with him and two other undergraduates – and I learnt much more from him than I did in conventional tutorials.
Norman’s been attacked by fellow Oxford and Cambridge dons for not taking his academic job seriously enough. But how many other professors in their 50s (as Norman then was) would give up their evenings to three callow undergraduates? None whom I came across.
In an undergraduate room in St John’s College, Norman would stick on a tape of Russian military marching tunes and sing along in fluent Russian. He’d knock
back our dodgy Bulgarian wine, and teach us about the First World War and the Yugoslav Wars, then raging. And, all the while, he would win hand after hand of bridge, memorising every card in his planet-sized brain.
He wasn’t trying to be down with the kids. We knew he was in a higher position than us – not just within the university but also in brain dimensions. He’d often declare, when I said something stupid, ‘You only say that because you know so little.’ He was right – I knew very little; I learnt lots more by listening to him.
Annabel Barber (author of the Blue Guide to Budapest, who with Norman co-wrote an article about the city in The Oldie earlier this year) said she’d once nervously asked Norman about his theories of history. ‘I don’t have any theories,’ he said. ‘I just know stories.’
That was the nub of his historical mind. He saw history as a collection of individuals – often making terrible mistakes; often doing extraordinary and funny things – not as impersonal clashes between, say, Marxism and capitalism.
His history was studded with anecdotes that reveal more of the truth than bloodless piles of theories. In World War One: A Short History (2007), he wrote that in 1914 the Russians were so desperate to win that the Tsar licked his own stamps. The masses foreswore vodka, unless foreigners were present. ‘By November 1914, foreigners were much in demand,’ said Norman.
In his last book, Hungary: A Short History (2019), he recalled the last words of Elena Ceaușescu, the Romanian dictator’s wife. She barked at the firing squad, ‘How can you do this to an honorary doctor of Imperial College, London?’
Norman’s hatred for cant and hypocrisy meant he couldn’t help telling the truth: whether about the disaster of Communism – or those Yugoslav Wars.
At his funeral, journalist John O’sullivan recalled Norman going on holiday in Bosnia in 1991 because, he said, ‘I want to go before it’s torn apart by carnage next year.’ No one believed him. He was spot-on.
Norman knew central Europe well because he spent a lot of the Sixties there. In 1964, he tried to smuggle someone’s girlfriend from Hungary to Austria via Slovakia. He was caught and spent three months in prison: ‘I shared the cell with a Transylvanian gypsy who did wonders for my Hungarian.’
Barber asked him why he’d embarked on this madcap adventure. ‘Because I’ve never been able to say no to a woman in a fur coat,’ he said.
How very funny he was. I asked him recently about his late wife, Christine, who died in 2016. He said, ‘Oh, she was very good. She saved me. I said to her, “What you’ve done is so wonderful. What token of love can I give you, what sign of my devotion?” “The rent,” she said.’
During Norman’s Oxford professorship, Ted Heath said, ‘Many parents of Oxford students must be both horrified and disgusted that the higher education of our children should rest in the hands of such a man.’
I can’t speak for my parents but I am impossibly grateful to have been educated by Norman Stone.