One of the specialities of the historian Norman Stone, who has died aged 78, was character assassination. Born in Glasgow, Norman was the son of Norman Sr, a fighter pilot who was killed in training just over a year later. Stone hated Oxford, which he thought (bizarrely) was full of Marxists and out of touch with the real world. His last post was at the Danube Institute, Budapest, and his last book, Hungary: A Short History (2018) praised the country’s authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán among other things for his tough line on immigration. • Norman Stone, historian, born 8 March 1941; died 19 June 2019

Source: The Guardian June 25, 2019 10:30 UTC