Christopher Hibbert: Historian

CHRISTOPHER Hibbert produced stylishly written, fast-paced histories and biographies embracing subjects as varied as King George IV, the French Revolution, the emperors of China and the city of Rome.

Although sometimes regarded askance by academic historians, Hibbert won a wide readership with his popular approach to historical subjects and his gift for narrative, on display in more than 60 books. He was a painstaking researcher but incurably readable, and critics often noted that his histories of, say, the Battle of Agincourt or the European grand tour had all the qualities of a good novel.

"The main aim is to entertain and tell a good, accurate story," he said an interview in 1990. "You've got to make the reader want to know what's going to happen next, even if you're writing about something the outcome of which is well known."

Arthur Raymond Hibbert was born in Enderby, Leicestershire. He left Oriel College, Oxford, to join the army, where a sneering sergeant-major called him Christopher Robin. The "Christopher" stuck. He served with the London Irish Rifles in Italy, where he was wounded twice and won the Military Cross. In the hospital he acquired fluent Italian, which turned out to be a great help in writing Il Duce: The Life of Benito Mussolini (1962), Garibaldi and His Enemies (1965) and Rome: The Biography of a City (1985). With the rank of captain, Hibbert briefly considered a military career. But he returned to Oxford, where he earned a history degree in 1948 and married a fellow student, Sue Piggford.

While employed as an estate agent in Henley, Hibbert accepted a friend's invitation to become television critic for a magazine called Truth. He also tried his hand at writing fiction, with little success, but found his calling after turning a novel about the 18th-century highwayman Jack Sheppard into a non-fiction work, The Road to Tyburn (1957). When his third book, The Destruction of Lord Raglan (1961), about the Crimean War, won a Royal Society of Literature prize , he turned to writing full-time, turning out a book a year.

His most substantial work was the two-volume biography George IV: Prince of Wales, 1762-1811 (1972) and George IV: Regent and King, 1812-1830 (1973), praised for its thoroughgoing, sympathetic assessment of a poorly understood figure. He also wrote biographies of Charles I, Samuel Johnson, Charles Dickens and Benjamin Disraeli, as well as studies of Venice and London that, like his book on Rome, carried the word "biography" in their subtitles.

"About half the books I write are on subjects I've chosen myself," he once said. "The rest of the time I rather feel like a barrister being given a brief. You're given your instructions and told, 'This is the subject for you, old chap, and we want 120,000 words'."

Christopher Hibbert is survived by his wife, daughter two sons and three grandchildren.