Valuable and Rare

Recently someone we knew very slightly but liked a lot died suddenly here in Budapest. When we received a message asking us to his funeral, we thought we ought to go as, being far from where he was born, the numbers might need swelling.

How foolish we were. Coming in out of the sunny afternoon into the elegant church on Deak ter, we realised that there was no need for us at all. The great and the good had arrived from all points of the globe to honour the life of Norman Stone.

And for very good reason, we realised, as we listened to the eulogies.

First up was Niall Ferguson, Milbank Family Senior Fellow at Stanford. He described the "teasing kind of favouritism" that Stone employed to bring out the best in those students of his who were not only bright but not any kind of weed, (in both the botanical and the Nigel Molesworthian sense of that word). Fergusson also explained that he never now put the word "hopefully" at the beginning of a sentence - not since benefitting from Stone's opinion on that subject.

Fergusson praised Stone for being that rare thing a pithy historian (possibly not a phrase you would want to try saying after a few drinks), for understanding the power of juxtaposing the past and the present and for being always original, if quite often late with copy. He suggested that a publisher with an eye to an opportunity might like to consider publishing an edited volume of Stone's journalism which contains much that remains fascinating, partly because Stone did not know how to be dull.

Fergusson returned to Stone's habit of referring to his students as weeds of various kinds and said that among the weeds of the world, Norman was a pimpernel who "shocked us, goaded us and shook us out of our weediness."  Finally, Fergusson reached for Wagner and with a cry of, "Love ever radiant, laughing death", farewelled his old teacher and friend.

Following Fergusson, came John O'Sullivan, President of the Danube Institute. He described Stone as a "shrewd advisor, inspiring teacher and loyal friend",  adding that, were he to be confined to one word to sum up the dead man, "controversialist" would be it. Professor Stone, he expained, "came by that honourable title honourably because he had a love of truth, a hatred of cant and hypocrisy, a suspicion of the conventional wisdom, a dislike of those who dealt in nothing else, a talent for mockery and a remarkable pen." He added that Stone was "gentle, quiet, helpful and kindly", except when roused. Once that happened, he "couldn't restrain himself from saying what he knew to be true against the most august authorities. Moreover, he would say it pithily and memorably and very often his most shocking insights turned out to be right." Perhaps the most startling of these was recounted in a letter to one of the English papers after his death in which a fellow academic was informed by Stone of his decision to travel to Bosnia Hercegovina in the summer of 1991. The fellow academic thought Stone was talking nonsense when Stone told him that he wanted to see the country before it was destroyed by civil war; sadly, he was not talking nonsense at all but demonstrating great prescience.

O'Sullivan described Stone as a man of enormous energy whose worst vice was that he was subject to boredom. Quoting Arnold Bennett, he finished by reminding us that Stone had achieved that rare and most valuable thing - he had contributed to "the great cause of cheering us all up".

Harold James, Professor of History and International Affairs at Princeton and also a former Stone student, came next. He told us that Stone was a conversationalist, a man who could inspire and someone who saw the essential nature of things very, very quickly, when "almost everyody else was muddling and waffling around, thinking foggily" - Stone's insight about the fate of Bosnia Hercegovina, cited by O'Sullivan, seems to bear this claim out.

Professor James told us that there was a clarity about Norman's thinking that may have been part of his background in the Scottish humanist tradition. It was, he said, valuable and rare. He also identified in Stone's work a distinct feeling for place that gets lost in a lot of sociological generalisations in the work of most historians. He reminded us that Stone had been a great advocate for freedom and mentioned that Stone had loved the Banffy trilogy of novels.

As a teacher, Professor James told us, Stone had been inspirational and, as a historian, he had possessed a deep human vision that very few historians are able to communicate as effectively as he had done. Professor James ended by remarking that there was some kind of symmetry or synchronicity in the fact that Stone's funeral was being held on 28 June 2019, exactly 100 years after the signing of the treaty of Versailles on 28th June, 1919

Michael O'Sullivan, author, (no relation of John), followed, explaining that he was Irish and then reading The Glories of our Blood and State by James Shirley, which he may have chosen before realising that the person he would be facing in the front row as he declaimed a poem about the fleeting nature of power and worldly success would be Viktor Orban. On the other hand, Mr O'Sullivan's publisher is the CEU, and the CEU has recently been at odds with the Orban government, so the gesture may have been entirely deliberate.

After that came Professor Sean McMeekin who was a colleague of Stone in Turkey. He talked enchantingly about how Stone had recruited him to a more interesting life than he had imagined he could ever have. The recruitment had involved a series of interviews conducted in Moscow pubs. McMeekin described a trip organised for students by Stone. Stone became so interested in a conversation he was having with a taxi driver - who was taking him to the airport to catch the plane for the quick trip to join the students and academics he had gathered - that he decided to skip flying and travel all the way in the taxi instead; that is, all the way from Istanbul, a journey of 300 miles.

He arrived only three minutes late, and the party set off. Quite rapidly, however, the coach driver became extremely lost. In the end, the group spent 10 to 12 hours together on that bus. They shared a bottle of sherry that had been a gift to one of them but was coopted in the circumstances for group sustenance and, during the course of "that one epic night", as McMeekin termed it, they learned quite a lot about the subject that was the supposed point of the journey - the history of Turkey, of the eastern Orthodox church and of Cappadocia. More importantly perhaps, the experience also brought them together - and it was this that McMeekin identified as one of Stone's greatest gifts: his gift for bringing people together, in scholarship, learning and friendship, and for making people's lives richer and much more interesting than they might otherwise have been.

The ambassador of the republic of Turkey followed and paid tribute to Stone, who had been a friend.

Finally the Chaplain of Christ Church, Istanbul, explained that Stone's was a soul that opened up to embrace what was best in any nation. He described Stone as never a bore, which he claimed was rare among those who speak many languages.

The dead man was also a churchman, the chaplain told us, a man who loved English liturgy and singing trusty established hymns. Stone served on the chaplaincy council in istanbul for 15 years, the chaplain revealed, contributing great support in the eventually successful campaign to overturn the scandalous decision by the British government to lease to a developer the space that had been the British Consulate chapel until destroyed by an Al Qaeda bomb, (rather than having it rebuilt and rehallowed). The chaplain ended by reiterating that Stone was not simply a great man celebrated by other great men but a true churchman and an outstanding person.

Several of the eulogists referred to some of the nasty things said about him by some of Stone's English obituarists.  John O'Sullivan pointed out that negative obituaries are an English tradition, which Stone himself participated in from time to time. Certainly Stone was extremely capable, from what I saw of him and what I heard about him on the afternoon of 28 June, to rise above the petty jibes of envious colleagues. More importantly, I realised that the person we met from time to time at parties and dinners was a great loss - a gregarious and brave personality, with an original and constantly inquiring mind. Would such a person be allowed to grow and thrive in the current academic climate, I wonder?

I doubt it, but one thing I do not doubt is that the fearlessness Stone regularly displayed (not least when attempting to smuggle a dissident across a border, leading to a stint in a prison in Communist Hungary) - a fearlessness he seems to have encouraged in his students as well - is a much needed quality in today's peculiar and alarming world.