A tribute to Norman Stone

Norman Stone has died at the age of 78. In 2007, Harry Mount paid tribute to the historian and author, republished here:

It’s four in the afternoon in the Garrick Club and Norman Stone is steaming with rage. The steam is not alcohol-fuelled. Professor Stone — historically no flincher from the glass — is on the wagon at the moment but is feeling no undue withdrawal pangs. He is, though, longing for a cigarette, and his beloved Garrick has just outlawed smoking, in line with the new legislation.

‘It’s quite clear that cigarettes calm you down, the opiate of what was once the working classes,’ says Stone once he has lit up and sat himself down on a pavement stool outside a Covent Garden pub. ‘If you take them away and you make booze so cheap, you end up with the Cornmarket [Oxford’s main shopping street] on a Friday night. Awful.’

It was Lenin, Stone tells me, who was responsible for the first non-smoking train in history, the one that took him through Germany to Finland after the Russian Revolution.