The history man

As I mentioned in my previous post, Lord Skidelsky, who died this week, was a member of Forest’s Advisory Council in the Nineties.

Another name on that list was his friend, historian Professor Norman Stone, and the extent of their friendship is revealed in a poignant, beautifully written blog post (Norman’s Last Day) published by Skidelsky a few weeks after Stone’s death in June 2019:

I came to Norman’s flat at lunch time on the 18th – a very elegant apartment in the heart of old Budapest. Norman’s resident factotum, a Turkish Kurd called Kabat Sebahattin, let me in. Norman was standing in dressing gown and pyjamas in the kitchen. I was shocked by his haggard, shrunken appearance.

‘Just got up,’ he told me. I had been looking forward to a bibulous lunch in a nearby eatery, but it was clear he wasn’t going anywhere soon. He was racked by a bronchial cough, though I noticed that he still reached surreptitiously for a cigarette.

Too unwell to have lunch (or dinner) with his friend, Norman Stone died that night. Skidelsky and Stone’s wife Seba were the last people to see him alive. In happier times, however, Skidelsky remembers:

… a dinner in London with Margaret Thatcher (who adored him, despite his smoking through all the courses), and nights out with Norman in Moscow with dubious oligarchs. Norman was fluent in Russian, which he spoke with a strong Scottish accent.

Sadly I never met Norman Stone because in 1997, two years before I joined Forest, he left Oxford, where he was professor of Modern History, and moved to Ankara in Turkey. In 2010, however, I learned a bit more about ‘the famously contrary historian’ when he was interviewed by the Telegraph (in a pub) during a visit to Oxford to promote a new book:

Grabbing a double gin and tonic at the bar, he departs immediately to the smoking area under a corrugated roof at the back of the pub. For him, the smoking ban is the most irritating manifestation of the British nanny state. No matter that, at the age of 69, he wheezes alarmingly as fag follows fag.

“On the one side, people can't smoke in a bar; on the other side, the entire young generation is drunk. It's absurd.”

He did once give up smoking but it turned him, he says, into an “ugly drunk”. “I didn't like that because I am not at heart a nasty person.”

See also: A tribute to Norman Stone (The Spectator)

Professor Norman Stone. Credit: DL Portrait/Alamy