Christopher Hibbert, 84, British Popular Historian (original) (raw)

Christopher Hibbert, 84, Lively Historian, Dies

Jan. 6, 2009

Christopher Hibbert, whose stylishly written, fast-paced histories and biographies embraced subjects as varied as King George IV, the French Revolution, the emperors of China and the city of Rome, died on Dec. 21 in Henley-on-Thames, England. He was 84 and lived in Henley-on-Thames.

The cause was bronchial pneumonia, said his daughter Kate Hibbert.

Although sometimes regarded askance by academic historians, Mr. 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 without attempting to make historical discoveries or change historical opinion in any way,” he told The Sunday Times of London 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.”

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Christopher Hibbert.Credit...Sally Soames/Sunday Times, 1990

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 fluency in Italian, which would turn 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, Mr. 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. She and their daughter, of London, survive him, as do his sister, Judy Mitchell; two sons, James, of Manchester, England, and Tom, of Henley; and three grandchildren.

While employed as a real estate agent in Henley, Mr. Hibbert accepted a friend’s invitation become the 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 nonfiction work, “The Road to Tyburn” (1957). When his third book, “The Destruction of Lord Raglan” (1961), about the Crimean War, won a prize from the Royal Society of Literature, he turned to writing full time, turning out a book a year.

His most substantial work was a two-volume biography of George IV, praised for its thoroughgoing, sympathetic assessment of a poorly understood figure: “George IV: Prince of Wales, 1762-1811” (1972) and “George IV: Regent and King, 1812-1830” (1973). 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 designation “biography” in their subtitles.

“About half the books I write are on subjects I’ve chosen myself, which both my American and English publishers have to want at the same time,” he told The Sunday Times. “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.’ ”

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