What’s wrong with Richard Evans’s obituary of Norman Stone?
There are two big surprises about the obituary of Norman Stone by Sir Richard Evans, the former Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, in the Guardian. First, how nasty it is. Second, how much it misses out.
As a teacher, Evans writes, Stone “became increasingly undisciplined, neglecting his duties, and spending increasing amounts of time playing poker and drinking himself into oblivion in Soho”. As a person he was “dogged by character flaws”. “At a time when malice and rudeness were highly prized by some Right-wing Cambridge dons, Stone outdid them all in the abuse he hurled at anyone he disapproved of.” He drank too much, “became notorious for groping his female students” and “espoused a number of Right-wing political causes”.
Evans concludes this unpleasant piece by quoting Edward Heath: “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.” He doesn’t, however, quote Stone’s response: “Everything good about Britain is due to Lady Thatcher. Everything bad is the fault of Edward Heath.”
This sums up the problems with Evans’s piece. There is a lack of balance throughout. He has little good to say about Stone as a teacher. I was taught by Stone at Cambridge in the late 1970s. He was a superb teacher. He could be extremely critical. In my first supervision he dismissed my essay as “piffle and wittering”. “You will start with a 2:1, then get a 2:2 and end up writing for the New Statesman.” Over the following weeks he taught me about the importance of social and economic history, about the old-fashioned virtues of empirical research and the importance of peasants in modern European history (something E.J. Hobsbawm and other Marxist historians could have learned from him).
In January 1996 there was a dinner held in Stone’s honour by many of his former students. Guests included Anne Applebaum, Niall Ferguson, Orlando Figes, Lords Jonathan Hill and Adair Turner, Sir Noel Malcolm, Andrew Roberts and Daniel Johnson, of this parish. How many history dons can you think of who have taught such illustrious students? Has Evans?
There is something else that is even more striking than the nasty tone of the piece. It is full of surprising absences. There are no references to J.H. Plumb (who wrote the introduction to Stone’s Hitler) or to Neil McKendrick, who was the most outstanding history teacher at Cambridge for several decades, and taught Stone as an undergraduate. Both men had a huge influence on Stone and his career.
There are no references to the great modern historians who influenced Stone, including A.J.P. Taylor and Richard Cobb, both fellow mavericks, who wrote beautifully and were not among the grey monograph men Stone so despised. He wrote about Taylor in 1995, “He could sum up something that was very complex, get to the heart of it and shed all the excess baggage.” The same was true of Stone at is best (The Eastern Front, 1914-1917 and Europe Transformed, 1878-1919).
Evans is fair enough to admit that The Eastern Front “did a great deal to redress the imbalance of the British historiography of the war, which had up to this point focused almost exclusively on the western front”, but dismisses Europe Transformed as “one of the weakest in an uneven series”. That is unfair to a book that is fascinating about the economic causes of the crisis of late 19th-century liberalism and excellent on fin-de-siècle culture.
Strangely, Evans also ignores the reason for Stone’s huge success as a media don in the 1980s and early 1990s. It was all about timing. As the Soviet Union crumbled and Germany was reunified, Stone was the right man in the right place at the right time. He spoke fluent Russian and German, he had written books on Russian and German history, and had consistently attacked Communism. He wrote every week in The Sunday Times and in 1990 Mrs Thatcher invited him to her Chequers seminar. Not many academics enjoy such status as a public intellectual; those that do inevitably inspire envy.
When I asked Stone in 1991 who would be interesting to talk to about the fall of Communism, he said at once, Leopold Labedz, former editor of Survey, by now long forgotten, living on his own in a small flat in west London. Labedz was an extraordinary figure who had fought Communism all through the Cold War. This was not the judgment of a drunk or a letch or a bad historian. Stone knew that Labedz mattered and didn’t care that no one remembered him in 1991. Labedz had got Communism right. So did Stone It is extraordinary that Evans, who has just written a huge hagiographical tome about the Communist historian, Eric Hobsbawm, doesn’t mention this.
And, of course, there was the famous attack on E.H. Carr in The London Review of Books in 1983, which the magazine has now republished, along with the furious responses it elicited from Hobsbawm and others. Some might compare Stone’s piece on Carr with Evans’s attack on Stone, both all-out attacks on fellow-historians just after they had died. The differences, though, are crucial. Stone’s piece was devastating. It single-handedly destroyed the reputation of one of Britain’s most famous historians. Go to the London Library today. On the shelves you will see two complete editions of Carr’s history of the Russian Revolution. One hasn’t been borrowed since it was published. Not once. Carr is a forgotten man. More important, Stone’s polemic was a major turning-point in the historiography of Soviet Russia. The excuses for Stalin’s crimes were left in rubble. No one thinks in the same way now about Carr or Soviet Communism. Evans’s piece, by contrast, with all its curious gaps and lack of context or of human sympathy, will be quickly forgotten.
