Hailed as a ‘legendary teacher, Thatcher adviser, hero of fiction, exiled maverick’ by the Independent, and an ‘advertisement for the regenerative powers of booze, fags and limitless curiosity’ by the Sunday Times, Norman Stone isn’t your average academic.
 
He holds nothing back, doesn’t always follow the path of least resistance, and along the way has picked up a few enemies. During Stone’s tenure as a Professor of Modern History at Oxford, Ted Heath once said: ‘Many parents of Oxford students must be horrified and disgusted that the higher education of our children should rest in the hands of such a man’. Meanwhile, Stone admits that if he were to visit Armenia, he would return with his ‘head in a basket’, following his refusal to regard the Turkish First World War massacre of the Armenians as an act of genocide.
 
To understand this ‘maker of enemies, and of memorable lines’ is to understand what gets on his nerves. Here is a comprehensive list of all the things that irritate him:

1. The ‘current incarnation’ of the Tory Party: ‘what’s the rock music, no ties and silly voices all about? They should just all stand up and declare that global warming is a huge con and passive smoking is completely harmless’.
   
2. The forces of anti-smoking, and the resulting effects that attempting to give-up smoking had on his work: ‘I did stop for a year, could write nothing memorable, and drank more than was good for me and anyone else.’
   
3. Long distance flights: as a result of being unable to smoke, ‘by the time the plane is flying over Halifax I’m a gibbering wreck’.
   
4. The British nanny state: ‘the British Middle Classes have become so used to being bossed around that they will put up with anything.’
   
5. The EU: he describes the organisation as a ‘tasteless Dutch vegetable’, and believes that the Foreign Minister Lady Ashton ‘looks like E.T as dressed by Oxfam’.
   
6. Women who deliberately make babies on their own: his father was killed in an RAF training exercise before he was even one, and he realises the damage it has done: ‘not having your daddy is a very bad thing’.
   
7. People ‘getting stuff wrong’: he vehemently defends his dispute with the Armenians over the First World War genocide- although he calls it a disaster, he believes ‘calling it a genocide is a step too far and muddles the argument’.
   
8. Anyone who calls him a ‘hack’: he dismisses his critics as ‘boring historians’.
   
9. The declining birth rate in Europe: ‘the old are taking over…devouring the next generation’s inheritance’.
   
10. The ousting of Margaret Thatcher who he fondly calls ‘Mrs. T’:, ‘A unique character. What would the Conservatives have been in the Eighties without her? Heath – Heath! Flabby-faced cowards. They didn’t have the balls’.

See Norman Stone speak at the upcoming IQ2 Event, ‘Norman Stone on Istanbul’, October 18th. Click here to buy tickets.