‘Turkish students smell less than British ones’

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 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. Like Lenin, Hitler was an anti-smoking fanatic; you knew the moment he’d died because his officers started lighting up in the bunker.
Little details like these are what make Stone’s new book on the first world war a gem, albeit a very little gem — 187 pages, including maps, index and sources — on a big subject. It’s Stone’s first book for over a decade, the first since his decision in 1997 to leave one of the plum jobs of British academia — the Oxford Professorship of Modern History — and head for obscure Bilkent University in Ankara.