This is taken from The Guardian:

Geoffrey Stern

Urbane observer of international relations in the lecture hall and on the airwaves
by Fred Halliday

Wednesday October 19, 2005

Geoffrey Stern, who has died of a heart attack aged 70, was a teacher and broadcaster of rare vitality. For many years a senior lecturer at the London School of Economics, he was not a man for conventional scholarly accumulation or deference. He conveyed, through his rhetorical sweep, Socratic engagement, informed speculation on world affairs and an overall enthusiasm for ideas and life, a commitment to the subject that no student or colleague could ever forget.

Not the least of his trademarks was a penchant for colourful shoes and shirts, purple being a particular favourite: it is said that once, during the annual LSE international relations weekend retreat at Cumberland Lodge in Windsor Great Park, Princess Anne, seeing Geoffrey out walking in his fauve attire, was so overcome with laughter that she had to stop her car.

Geoffrey's family on his father's side had come to Britain from Poland in the late 19th century and settled in Essex. His father Malcolm was an accountant and his mother Rose, who Geoffrey cared for until her death at 93, had been a piano teacher. He did not make much of his origins but last year, with his children, Tiffany and Jonathon, he paid a visit to the town of Dabrowa Tarnowska, near Cracow, from which his grandfather had emigrated.

Geoffrey grew up in London, attended Marylebone grammar school and was evacuated to a very strict girls' school in Bournemouth during the war. He was an undergraduate at LSE in the mid-1950s, with South Africa expert Jack Spence and the innovator in international relations theory Michael Banks, and taught there, both in the international relations department and on the external programme, from 1960 to 2000. He was old enough to remember Hiroshima, an event, he told startled younger audiences, that no one at the time seemed to regret.

Geoffrey was, in a sometimes idiosyncratic way, loyal to the teachings of the English school of Charles Manning, founder of the international relations department, for whom he always maintained respect. While not in awe of power, and sceptical of calls for reforming or improving the international system, Geoffrey and his English school associates at the same time dissented from the more hardline realism of their German and American counterparts, for whom international law, shared norms and a loose association termed "international society" meant little.

Geoffrey had little time for the increasingly dominant theoretical trends associated with American international relations, and, in one famous LSE debate, upbraided his former pupil, the conservative American Richard Perle, while brandishing a copy of one of the latter's essays of decades before.

In his last years at LSE, faced with new theoretical fashions and a post-cold war world in which claims of reform and improvement were very much in the air, Geoffrey acquired a new burst of enthusiasm for the teachings of his younger years. He seized with relish the opportunity to teach the core first-year undergraduate course on IR theory, and published his own introduction to the subject, The Structure of International Society (1995, revised 2000).

In teaching, and in his work for the BBC, he also showed a sustained interest in the workings and evolution of the communist world: he produced three books on the topic: Fifty Years of Communism (1967), The Rise and Decline of International Communism (1990) and Communism, an Atlas (1991). He was never interested in power himself, but was observant of its attractions and mechanisms, a concern that saw light in Leaders and Leadership (1993), an edited collection of his interviews with political leaders for the BBC. In this book, dedicated to his friend, the broadcaster John Tusa, he probed a range of characters - among them Helmut Schmidt, Garret Fitzgerald, Lee Kuan Yew, Kenneth Kaunda, Benazir Bhutto and King Hussein.

His voice, presenting the flagship World Service programme 24 Hours, flanked by a jazz programme he also presented, rang out across the world. His interviewing style was very much an expression of the man - probing but respectful, brisk but not superficial, informed but not detached. The producers with whom he worked may have been driven mad by his tendency to over-run the allotted time for interviews, but he would win them round with his Groucho Marx-style humour.

Broadcasting was, with teaching, one of the passions of Geoffrey's life, but he was equally devoted to another activity, music. As a student, he had composed a piece for orchestra that was played at the LSE and, on retirement, he threw himself back into this world, writing a piece in honour of Dr Anne Boehm, the much admired secretary of the LSE graduate school, a string quartet and music for wind instruments. He was an accomplished jazz pianist, having once supplemented his income playing in a nightclub, and had a particular fondness for the music of Art Tatum (a taste he shared with the American neo-realist theoretician and personal friend, Kenneth Waltz).

But it was perhaps his passion for people that animated him most of all, and for which he will be most remembered. A quintessential Londoner and a teacher with all the irony and intellectual scepticism of the British stereotype, Geoffrey appealed to young people from around the world. He never stopped engaging, arguing, challenging: the last time I saw him, at a seminar on the aftermath of the July bombings in London, organised by the research centre of one of his former Arab students, he chided me, in my attempt at a balanced analysis, for "trying to cheer people up".

At times overplaying his mischievousness, at others underplaying his intelligence, Geoffrey reflected much of the best in the open, probing and unregulated British academic culture of the postwar decades. He was a spirit at once committed and free, from whom all who knew him, students and teachers alike, derived much inspiration.

He and his wife Elisabeth were divorced. He is survived by their two children, and his partner of 10 years, Joy Moore.

Michael Simmons writes: Reporting from eastern Europe during its communist period was never easy, and frequently entailed the use of exchanged confidences and inside information - not in any sinister sense, but in the sense that lives could be made very uncomfortable, not to say endangered, if one lapsed into indiscretion. Geoffrey Stern, once you got beneath his sometimes brusque exterior, was great for exchanging confidences with, and we used each other in this way for many years.

He was also a great conspirator, taking a small group of journalists - calling themselves writers, translators, publishers or just students - on a clandestine week-long trip to Albania in the early 1980s, when the country was rigidly closed and secretive to the point of paranoia. How he actually planned and organised the trip I do not know, but it worked perfectly. It was fascinating and instructive throughout. By the end of the week, I was convinced that at least some of the Albanian officials probably knew as well as we did that we were all journalists, but they felt they would have been compromised to shop us to their superiors.

· Geoffrey Howard Stern, academic and broadcaster, born February 5 1935; died October 4 2005