The nation loses an academic giant in Norman Stone. I have lost a friend
Norman Stone was, appropriately, drunk when I first met him. It was the day of Denmark’s “No” to Maastricht in 1992, and the professor was entertaining a group of Oxford undergraduates with a glorious miscellany of anecdotes about that country. Stone, who died this week, had a unique ability to remain witty, winsome and wise while plastered. “You were all born after my first adultery,” he chuckled in his gravelly Glaswegian voice, waving his hand over the assembled students like an amiable bishop dispensing benediction. Then he stumbled cheerfully across the quad singing “Oh Death, where is thy sting-a-ling-aling?”
The next morning, he wrote an immaculate article that put Denmark’s Euroscepticism into its historical perspective, replete with facts that were both true and surprising. That was his real gift. He had a matchless hoard of historical asides, and was able to bring them in an uncontrived way into his academic work, just as into his lectures, his
columns and his alcohol-fuelled storytelling.
Norman’s critics could not see past his baroque lifestyle. They wanted to dismiss him as a flâneur, a shock-jock, a journalist. In fact, his playfulness was not a distraction from his intellectual work, but an essential component of it. His books were a delight, precisely because reading them was like listening spellbound to a master raconteur.
There is no doubting Stone’s brilliance. When he was 43, he left Cambridge to become Professor of Modern History at Oxford, arguably the supreme accolade for an academic historian. His knack for languages bordered on the miraculous. He spoke French, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Russian, Serbo-Croat and Spanish. More impressively, he mastered both Hungarian and Turkish, becoming convinced in the process that they were more closely connected than linguists usually allow. When I say “mastered”, I don’t mean, as historians sometimes do, that he could get through source material with the aid of a dictionary. I mean that he could deliver a speech or conduct a TV interview in that tongue.
Stone’s death is like a great library being razed to the ground. We have lost, not just a congeries of arresting facts, but some extraordinary firsthand experience. For example, he learned his Hungarian from a Transylvanian gipsy with whom he shared a cell for three months after being caught trying to smuggle someone across the Iron Curtain in 1964. He was intimately involved with Hungary’s anti-communist dissidents, including the present prime minister, Viktor Orbán. That experience infused what turned out to be his last book,
Hungary: A Short History, published earlier this year, every page of which reads like one of his brilliant, latenight disquisitions. To pluck an example more or less at random, here he is on Arthur Koestler’s Budapest quarter in the early 20th century, where the writer “grew up, in an overheated flat with cats, antimacassars, endless objects, stuffy furniture and a mother whose bosom heaved up and down with incipient outrage and hypochondria”.
Had he been on the Left, Stone would have been acknowledged as one of our towering public intellectuals, and his occasionally louche lifestyle would have been an asset. But conservative thinkers often occupy a space invisible to commissioning editors. BBC bosses don’t mind populist conservatives. They will generally make space for the Nigel Farages and Julia Hartley-Brewers and Richard Littlejohns – and a good thing, too. But a serious Right-wing intellectual is regarded either as a logical impossibility or, at best, as a kind of class traitor.
Stone was a generous man, but he had no time for the pieties of his caste. In one of his books, he pitilessly went after the Western academics who had excused the Soviet Union. He loved Margaret Thatcher, who sometimes turned to him for advice. He voted for Brexit.
His opinions upset his many of his fellow dons – and, of course, a few student activists. He put up with being called a racist, despite having mixedrace children. He even put up with having “Norman Stone – homophobe!” stencilled in paint on the route along which he walked his young boy to school. But, in the end, he couldn’t stand the pettiness of British academic life.
In 1997, to general astonishment, he gave up his Oxford chair for a bigger budget and a freer intellectual climate in Ankara. (The event that eventually turned him against the Erdoğan government was, aptly enough, its ban on alcohol in places of education, which meant that wine was no longer served in Bilkent University’s Senior Common Room.) In walking away from Britain’s top job, he confronted many of his fellow tutors with their essential smallness. Naturally, they found it hard to forgive him.
The same is not true, though, of his students. They, whether on the Left or the Right, remember an astonishingly kind man, whose interest in young people was unfeigned, who preferred teaching to writing, and who inspired an entire generation of historians. In the end, the reason he made some of colleagues feel small is that he really was a bigger human being than they were.
The nation has lost a great scholar. I have lost a great friend.
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