The Eastern Front 1914-1917 by Norman Stone

This was a scintillating narrative based on a wide range of sources in several languages, including both Russian and German, admirably succinct and clearly argued. In 1975 he published the book that made his reputation: The Eastern Front 1914-1917, which won him the Wolfson history prize and numerous laudatory reviews. With a good degree in the subject, he embarked on a PhD on the Austro-Hungarian army before 1914, though never completed it, and gained a reputation for brilliance sufficient, along with his linguistic abilities, to obtain a research fellowship at Caius in 1965, and two years later an assistant lectureship in Russian history, moving to Jesus College in 1971 as director of studies in history. Brought up by his mother, Mary (nee Pettigrew), a teacher, he was sent to Glasgow academy on a scholarship from his father’s squadron, flourished academically, and went to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, to study modern languages, switching to history shortly after his arrival. Yet his career was also dogged by character flaws that prevented him from fulfilling his early promise as a historian.īorn in Glasgow, Norman was the son of Norman Sr, a fighter pilot who was killed in training just over a year later. He was a talented linguist who read and spoke more than half a dozen languages, including Hungarian. He could write entertainingly and could summarise complex historical circumstances in a few pregnant sentences, gifts which brought him a flourishing career as a journalist and commentator. When a colleague criticised this “outrageous” diatribe to his face, telling him that Carr “always said you were amoral”, Stone responded: “And he always said you were a bore” (probably an invention, though one cannot know for sure).Īt a time when malice and rudeness were highly prized by some rightwing Cambridge dons, Stone outdid them all in the abuse he hurled at anyone he disapproved of, including feminists (“rancid”), Oxford dons (“a dreadful collection of deadbeats, dead wood and has-beens”), students (“smelly and inattentive”), David Cameron and John Major (“transitional nobodies”), Edward Heath (“a flabby-faced coward”) and many more. Shortly after the death in 1982 of his patron and mentor in Cambridge, EH Carr, the author of a multivolume History of Soviet Russia and influential works on historiography and international relations, Stone published a lengthy assault on his reputation, which included lurid details of his three marriages. As a judge of the Fraenkel prize in contemporary history some years ago, he told the astonished members of the jury that they should not award the prize to a historian of Germany whose politics he disliked because she was an East German agent – an allegation that was enough to rule her out of contention even though it was absolutely baseless and undoubtedly defamatory. One of the specialities of the historian Norman Stone, who has died aged 78, was character assassination.

The Eastern Front 1914-1917 by Norman Stone