The journalist Eric Jacobs was both astonished and grieved to find himself at the centre of a bitter literary and ethical quarrel involving personal exchanges and recriminations with the novelist Martin Amis after the death of the latter’s father, Kingsley. Jacobs had previously spent three years constantly in Amis père’s company, much of the time at the bar of the Garrick Club, while effectively acting as a Boswell to his Johnson in preparing and writing Kingsley Amis: The Authorised Biography (1995).

Seen by some as Kingsley’s way of getting a second bite at the cherry, since he had already produced an autobiography only a few years earlier, Jacobs’s book was counted a success, both with the public and the subject. And the friendship established between biographer and biographee did not end, as often happens, with the completion of the book.

The biographer, distantly echoing the title of one of Kingsley Amis’s late flush of novels, The Biographer’s Moustache (though Jacobs was quite bald and unwhiskered), continued almost out of habit as a companion and gofer to the veteran novelist.

When Amis fell ill while on his customary annual holiday in Swansea, Jacobs hastened to his side and accompanied him back to London. Over Kingsley’s last weeks and days, just as he had done during his work on the biography, Jacobs recorded the minutiae of his friend’s thoughts and his failing health.

On the novelist’s death, he was asked by The Sunday Times to allow the publication of this diary, which he himself saw as no more than a postscript to the biography. However, it incensed Martin Amis, to whom Jacobs had already shown the diaries, because it contained not only a harrowing description of Amis’s declining powers but private details concerning the novelist’s domestic and family affairs. Jacobs temporarily withdrew the diary, though when the newspaper ran it after some time had elapsed, Martin Amis abruptly resigned his contract as a book reviewer.

Amis junior condemned the diaries as “written without thought for the memory of my father”, and Jacobs for submitting for publication “information gained under false pretences for personal gain”. He also cancelled the unsigned contract for the biographer to edit Kingsley’s letters, which had been agreed by his father, handing the job instead to his American tennis partner, Zachary Leader.

Jacobs fired salvoes of his own during his battle with Martin Amis, in a letter to The Guardian claiming that Kingsley hadn’t much cared for his son’s novels, adding: “No doubt Kingsley kept quiet out of a decent paternal tact. Or it may be he felt himself unqualified on account of his difficulty in reading his son’s novels to the end.” Both privately and publicly, however, Jacobs regretted the dispute, admitting that he was guilty of a misjudgment in offering the diaries to The Sunday Times so quickly after Kingsley’s death, but defending his motives in writing the diary.

Eric Jacobs was a well-liked Fleet Street figure who enjoyed a varied career, including stints on The Glasgow Herald, The Guardian, The Sunday Times (writing an account of the industrial dispute that kept the paper off the streets for a year), and subsequently on Eddie Shah’s now-defunct newspaper, Today, where he wrote the leaders.

For some years he was an industrial correspondent (serving briefly for a time as press officer to the Prices and Incomes Board), but the “Winter of Discontent” in the late 1970s confirmed a swing to the Right in his political beliefs: one union leader observed that, as a reporter of trade-union affairs, Jacobs was “like a vet who hates cats”.

Eric David Jacobs’s Jewish father, Arthur Jacobs, was a urologist and doyen of the medical profession in Glasgow whose wife Isobel, a nurse, was from outside his faith. Eric was sent to the Scottish public school, Loretto, thus inducing, he claimed, a lifelong revulsion for rugby union — largely through being forced to watch on cold or wet winter afternoons.

Before reading English at Pembroke College, Oxford, he did his National Service as a subaltern with the Queen’s Own Royal Glasgow Yeomanry, finding himself in Iraq — well before the days of Saddam Hussein — as a tank instructor to the Iraqi Army, which nonetheless gave him some status as a conversationalist on Middle Eastern affairs.

He is survived by his former wife, Beverley, his daughter and son.

Eric Jacobs, journalist, was born in Glasgow on January 22, 1936. He died suddenly in London on February 28, 2003, aged 67.