The younger Norman attended the Glasgow Academy on a scholarship for the children of deceased servicemen, and graduated from Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, with first-class honours in Part II of the History tripos (1959–62).

[8][9] Following his undergraduate degree, Stone did research in Central European history in Vienna and Budapest (1962–65), studying archives on the Austro-Hungarian Army from the years before 1914.

During this period he spent three months imprisoned in Bratislava, having been caught trying to smuggle a Hungarian dissident in his car boot across the Iron Curtain at the Czech–Austrian border.

But as he led us through the corridors of EC lunacy, you saw the point: only through a Lewis Carroll mirror could you meet such grotesques as the Gatt kings: Not so long ago a cow cost more than a student.

Nowadays, a non-cow costs even more ... On 1 September 1939, the League (of Nations) ignored Hitler's invasion of Poland because it was embarrassing, it moved instead to discuss the standardisation of level-crossings.

[24] Stone questioned the use of the word genocide in connection with the deaths of approximately 1.5 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, arousing significant controversy.

"[26] In his biography of Hitler, Stone critiqued Mein Kampf as "long-winded, self-important, and written in an extraordinarily opaque jargon, though not much more so than other works of sociology".

"[10] In his Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry on Stone, Lawrence Goldman writes that: His behaviour was often erratic, his life sometimes chaotic, his promise unfulfilled.

"[1] While in Vienna in the 1960s, Stone met (Marie) Nicole Aubry, the niece of the finance minister in "Papa Doc" Duvalier's Haiti dictatorship.

[29] On 11 August 1982, he married Christine Margaret Booker (née Verity), a leading member of the British Helsinki Human Rights Group.

[3][23] The protagonist of Robert Harris's novel Archangel (1998), Christopher "Fluke" Kelso, an Oxford historian of the Soviet Union who tracks down the covert son of Joseph Stalin, is based on Stone.

[23] Another thinly veiled version of Stone appears in Charles Beaumont's novel A Spy Alone (2023) as Peter Mackenzie, a hard-drinking Oxford historian with right-wing views and connections who once tried to smuggle a dissident over the Iron Curtain in the boot of his car.