The map turns red

Norman Stone forsook the chair of modern history at Oxford university for Ankara after realising that the ‘conversation at high tables would generally have made the exchanges in the bus- stop in the rain outside seem exhilarating’.

Norman Stone forsook the chair of modern history at Oxford university for Ankara after realising that the ‘conversation at high tables would generally have made the exchanges in the bus- stop in the rain outside seem exhilarating’. Dur- ing an earlier incarnation at Cambridge, Stone taught a galaxy of historians. His protégés include David Blackbourn, Harald James and Richard Overy, followed by Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts, all bar two now working at Harvard or Princeton. During the 1980s Margaret Thatcher judged Stone one of the outstanding minds in England, his talents as evident in his long run as a Sunday columnist as in books. In the interim, he has become a passionate advocate for Turkey against a very powerful Armenian diaspora.

The Atlantic and its Enemies derives much of its fascination from being an intellectual autobiography concealed within a major history book. A lengthy note vividly retells one of Stone’s scrapes, which landed him in a Czechoslovak jail for trying to help someone flee. Throughout, he alludes to various unmemorable Sixties books and the occasional film. Otherwise, his cultural tastes are conventionally donnish: Russian pianists and Wagner, with far less on art or literature (except Balzac and Dickens). He must be an outstanding raconteur, judging from the random by-ways he so frequently explores.

The book focuses on the fate of the European Great Powers from 1945 to 1991 or thereabouts, with the US and other parts of the world, notably Chile and Turkey, more or less successfully riveted on. Like any good historian, Stone knows about the phenomenon of the benign coup, from the shades of General Schleicher onwards, though he knows too much about Turkey to make it readily comprehensible in the way he does with Korea or Vietnam.