Norman Stone

Norman Stone (8 March 1941 – 19 June 2019) was a British historian and author. At the time of his death, he was Professor of European History in the Department of International Relations at Bilkent University, having formerly been a professor at the University of Oxford, a lecturer at the University of Cambridge, and an adviser to British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. He was a board member of the Center for Eurasian Studies (AVIM), and devoted some of the last years of his life to promoting Armenian genocide denial. Early life and education Stone was born in Kelvinside, Glasgow, the son of Mary Robertson (née Pettigrew, died 1991), a schoolteacher, and Norman Stone, a flight lieutenant and Spitfire pilot in World War II who fought in the Battle of Britain. He attended the Glasgow Academy on a scholarship for the children of deceased servicemen – his father having been killed in a training accident in 1942 – and graduated from Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, with first-class honours in Part II of the History tripos (1959–62). Following his undergraduate degree, Stone did research in Central European history in Vienna and Budapest (1962–65), studying archives on the Austro-Hungarian Army from the years before 1914. During this period he spent three months imprisoned in Bratislava, having been caught trying to smuggle a Hungarian dissident in his car boot across the Iron Curtain at the Czech–Austrian border. Career