I met Norman Stone at a diplomats’ cocktail party in Ankara in 1994 or thereabouts. I took to him immediately – this warm, humorous mischievous person – and we spent some time together as long as we were both based in the capital. I knew when I met him that he had been Professor of Modern History at Oxford and was now teaching at Bilkent. I knew that he had been a speechwriter for Margaret Thatcher and spoke a number of languages. I had read Europe Transformed (1878–1919), an inspiring book hiding under an uninspiring title. I knew enough history to enjoy his adventurous monologues during a typical evening at the Hittit Bar, or long Sunday breakfasts at my flat in Kennedy Caddesi that stretched out into midday refreshments. What I wasn’t aware of was just how big a celebrity he was, in Cambridge, Oxford, London and Bilkent. I was probably fortunate in that, because I wasn’t tempted to lionise him. I wasn’t even sure, at the beginning, that he was a Tory, although I might have guessed from his protest at that first cocktail party: “Why do you keep introducing me to all these terrible lefties, Roger?” I have never set much store by the left-right divide. There seem to me more useful categories, if categories are needed.

I was at that time (among other things) writing for the Turkish Daily News and asked if I could interview Norman for what was then Turkey’s only English-language daily. The circulation was small – 40,000 odd – but the diplomats read it and so did the politicos (or they had someone read it for them). Norman readily agreed to my request and we met at his Bilkent digs – spare, masculine, impersonal – to have a chat. He was a Glasgow man, he told me, whose father had died on active service in the Royal Air Force and who went to the best school around, courtesy of RAF funds. He talked more of Glasgow than of Cambridge – indeed there was very little of Cambridge, rather more of Oxford.

Academic life as an Oxford professor, he said, was “like swimming in glue”. This was as close as he got to explaining his surprising move from the old spires of Oxford to the new suburbs of Bilkent. Close enough, if you think about it. He had few compliments for the average Oxford student of the early 1990s: “They are less interested in the life of the mind and more interested in getting together with the bird or bloke of their choice, finding a room, buying a microwave and playing housey-housey.”…