Cambridge

Stone did not complete his doctorate,^[7] having been offered a research fellowship by Gonville and Caius College, where he later became an assistant lecturer in Russian and German History (1967), and a full lecturer (1973). In 1971, he transferred from Caius to Jesus College.^[2] While Stone was well regarded as a teacher, over time he increasingly neglected his duties.^[8]

Oxford

Stone was appointed in 1984 as Professor of Modern History at Oxford University, England.^[9] Stone's tenure at Oxford was not without controversy. Petronella Wyatt wrote that Stone "loathed the place as petty and provincial, and for its adherence to the Marxist-determinist view of history."^[10] During his period at Oxford Stone gained a reputation for groping female students.^[8]

Stone published a column in The Sunday Times between 1987 and 1992, and was also employed by the BBC, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and The Wall Street Journal.^[11] Stone became Margaret Thatcher's foreign policy advisor on Europe,^[9] as well as her speechwriter.^[12]

In May 1994 Stone gave a half-hour Opinions lecture televised on Channel 4 and subsequently published in The Independent. That newspaper later reviewed the lecture as "Little England has never had such great lines: there were the Germans (They want to be good Europeans because it stops them being bad Germans), and the Scandinavians (They only unite around the principle of finding the goody-goody Swedes very irritating)... But as he led us through the corridors of EC lunacy, you saw the point: only through a Lewis Carroll mirror could you meet such grotesques as the Gatt kings: Not so long ago a cow cost more than a student. Nowadays, a non-cow costs even more ... On 1 September 1939, the League (of Nations) ignored Hitler's invasion of Poland because it was embarrassing, it moved instead to discuss the standardisation of level-crossings."^[13]

Turkey

In 1997, Stone retired from his chair at Oxford and left to teach at the department of International Relations at Bilkent University, Ankara.^[14] As an example of Stone's wit and acute understanding, Niall Ferguson shares in his obituary paper the answer Stone gave when asked why he had moved: "in the depth of my being, I'm a Scotsman and feel entirely at home in an enlightenment that has failed".^[15]

In 2005 Stone transferred to Koç University, Istanbul. He later returned to Bilkent University to teach for the 2007–2008 academic year. He guest lectured at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. After moving to Turkey, Stone became a frequent contributor to Cornucopia, a magazine about the history and culture of Turkey. In 2010, Stone published a book on Turkish history, from the 11th century to the present day, Turkey: A Short History.^[16][17]

Views

Stone received some criticism for an obituary he wrote in 1983 for the London Review of Books of E. H. Carr,^[18] denouncing Carr's support of the Soviet Union, which some felt bordered on the defamatory.^[19] Lawrence Goldman notes however that "Stone’s critique of an unreadable multi-volume chronicle of Soviet policy based only on official sources was undoubtedly correct, and foreshadowed the collapse of the Soviet Union itself."^[20]

In 1990 Stone was one of the historians behind the setting up of the History Curriculum Association. The Association advocated a more knowledge-based history curriculum in schools. It expressed "profound disquiet" at the way history was being taught in the classroom and claimed that the integrity of history was threatened.^[21]

Stone questioned the use of the word genocide in connection with the deaths of approximately 1.5 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War One, arousing significant controversy. In 2004, he took part in a notable letter exchange on the pages of The Times Literary Supplement, where he strongly criticized Peter Balakian's 2003 book The Burning Tigris, saying that Balakian "should stick to the poems". Stone praised Guenter Lewy, Bernard Lewis and France-based scholar Gilles Veinstein, all of whom do not believe a genocide took place.^[22]

In 2009, he argued: "The myth of Winston Churchill is dangerous. Was it a sensible strategy in 1944 and 1945 to bomb Germany to bits? It was very bad realpolitik, whatever its moral purpose."^[23] In his biography of Hitler, Stone critiqued Mein Kampf as "long-winded, self-important, and written in an extraordinarily opaque jargon, though not much more so than other works of sociology".^[24]

Stone described John Keegan's The Second World War as his preferred book on WWII, saying: 'There have been many and varied, and sometimes splendid, books on The Second World War, but my own preference is John Keegan's The Second World War (1990)'.^[25]

Writing

For The Eastern Front 1914-1917 (1975) Stone won the Wolfson History Prize.^[26][8] He also wrote Hitler (1980), Europe Transformed 1878–1919 (1983), which won the Fontana History of Europe Prize, and World War I: A Short History (2007).^[9]

Assessments

In his obituary of Stone in The Guardian, the historian Richard J. Evans stated that unlike Niall Ferguson or A.J.P. Taylor, ''Stone's provocations were little more than the voicing of his own personal political prejudices, and so had little or no effect on the way we think about the past".^[8]

In his Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry on Stone, Lawrence Goldman writes that:

His behaviour was often erratic, his life sometimes chaotic, his promise unfulfilled. He tested to destruction the traditional indulgence of academic brilliance and eccentricity in both Cambridge and Oxford. He retained the admiration and support of a group of younger historians whom he had taught, or whom he inspired as a Conservative historian in a left-leaning profession. They included Niall Ferguson, Orlando Figes, and Andrew Roberts.^[20]