As an enthusiast for the prose of Sir Francis Urquhart, Robert Burton and Laurence Sterne, Richard Boston was not a conventional journalist. In a career as eclectic as his own well-stocked mind, he worked for such diverse titles as Peace News and The Times Literary Supplement. Ahead of its time was his own The Vole, a late-1970s green pioneer.

Born in 1938, he attended Stowe, studied art for two years at the Regent Street Polytechnic, and took an MA at King’s College, Cambridge. He travelled for some years and taught in Sicily, Sweden and France. Of another ambition, acting, the only evidence is Playtime where he stands in for Jacques Tati in some distant scenes.

Back in London in the mid-1960s, married to Anne Boston for some years, he worked as a journalist. Staff jobs included Peace News, New Society and TLS, and he became known for an oddball but passionate take on the passing scene. Perhaps most widely read was a weekly Guardian column about beer, for which he had developed a taste.

He explained this in a book, Beer and Skittles (1976) — beer had changed, not him. Hack work for a guidebook in 1972 obliged him to visit some London pubs: “I was appalled by what the brewers had done to pubs I hadn’t visited for years: then I gradually began to realise what they had done to the beer. The familiar hand pumps were rapidly vanishing, being replaced by top-pressure CO2 systems that made the beer fizzy. Even worse, the traditional draught beer (in whatever way it was served) was becoming hard to find and the much-advertised, gaudily-presented keg beers were being vigorously promoted.”

Boston loved beer and his column helped to stop the gassy rot, and inspired others’ campaigns for real cheese and bread.

He brought a similar spirit to editing The Vole in 1977. Michael Palin’s diaries record his going with Terry Jones to a Hampstead pub, The Flask, where Jones showed the first issue to The Observer’s poetry critic Al Alvarez. “Alvarez’s eyes don’t exactly light up. ‘Oh, yes, it’s Richard Boston’s thing, isn’t it?’ Terry, glad at least of some positive reaction, affirms. ‘He’s such a tit, isn’t he?’ murmurs the poetry critic of The Observer as he flicks through. Alvarez seems very cynical about the readership — ‘city countrymen’, he calls them, uncharitably. But I know what he means, in a way.”

The Vole lasted three years, and then Boston took over editorship from Craig Raine of a monthly literary magazine Quarto in due course subsumed within the Literary Review. Far from deserving Alvarez’s scorn, Boston was an elegant writer, the shelf of his books too short. Along with a collection of his articles, punningly entitled Baldness Be My Friend (1977) — the cover shows him scalp-on in a deckchair — he wrote the acute study An Anatomy of Laughter. Its 250 pages encapsulate Boston’s reading, which switches easily between Bergson, Freud and the Marx Brothers, with such unexpected assertions as “the Fool aspect of Jesus has been recognised by the American theologian Harvey Cox”.

Evidently Jones and Palin were unaware that in this glorious book there are several acerbic references to Alvarez. Boston quoted Clives James on “a wholly new kind of complacency which Alvarez has unintentionally done his share of bringing into the world: full-frontal solemnity”.

There was none of that about Osbert Lancaster, of whom Boston slowly wrote a brisk biography (1989). They met when Boston rented a cottage in Aldworth, Berkshire, and found that the cartoonist was his neighbour and landlord. Five years later he bought a house of his own there.

Whether enthusing about France or the Traveling Wilburys or lamenting his run-in with the tax authorities (“they simply couldn’t grasp that a cheque I’d paid in was given to me after I’d paid the whole bill for lunch as I’d got the cash on me at the time”), Boston always found something to amuse him.

He died after a short illness. He is survived by his first wife Anne, and by Marie-Claude, whom he married a year ago.

Richard Boston, journalist and writer, was born December 29, 1938. He died on December 22, 2006, aged 67