There was a touch of brilliance about everything that Angus Calder turned his hand to, but perhaps in the end he turned his hand to too many things. Poet, social historian, teacher, critic, essayist, drinking companion, distinctive contributor to the Scottish literary scene, he was a hard man to pin down, and since the British prefer to place their writers in convenient pigeonholes, he was not in the end accorded the critical acclaim that he deserved. And yet the body of work that he left behind, in its range and influence, suggests that he should be placed as a foremost chronicler of the British people.

His defining history of wartime Britain, The People’s War: Britain 1939- 1945, not only broke new ground in telling the story of ordinary citizens in extraordinary circumstances, it challenged the mythology that had gathered around a nation at war and returned to it the real history of its people. Published in 1969, it has been repeatedly mined for information ever since, and has never been out of print. With this and later books, Revolutionary Empire and The Myth of the Blitz, Calder established himself as a revisionist historian of the first order.

On the other hand, his work never denigrated the achievements of the British. For instance, he recorded the very mixed views that people had about Churchill, but he did so without political bias. The Land Army girl who wrote of Britain’s wartime leader in her diary in 1942: “The traditional England he champions is not the one I want to see preserved” was reflecting a view that was to sweep Churchill from power three years later, but Calder left her to make the point rather than doing so himself.

He published works of literary criticism — on Russian literature from Pushkin to Chekhov, on Walter Scott and Robert Burns, on Robert Louis Stevenson and Hugh MacDiarmid; he lectured at universities in Africa; he wrote poetry all his life, publishing five volumes, and winning the Eric Gregory Award in 1967; not least, he was a much loved and greatly respected teacher, for 14 years, at the Open University in Scotland.

He travelled widely across the country to aid his pupils, rather than doing so at a remote distance. A passionate adherent to the old Scottish concept of the democratic intellect, he took particular pride in the honours degree gained by a man he had first met dressed in overalls and delivering stores at the university. He paid tribute to Calder for the inspirational teaching that had changed his life.

Angus Lindsay Calder was born in Surrey in 1942, the son of the Scottish journalist, scientist, UN official and peace campaigner Ritchie Calder, later Lord Ritchie-Calder of Balmashanner in the Burgh of Forfar. Educated at Wallington County Grammar School and King’s College, Cambridge, he took his doctorate at the school of social studies at Sussex University, under its first Vice-Chancellor, Asa Briggs.

Calder and a colleague, Paul Addison, later Professor of History at Edinburgh University, rediscovered the invaluable interviews carried out by Mass-Observation during the war and persuaded Briggs to accommodate them and their owner Tom Harrisson. “For me”, wrote Calder in an introduction, “they were an indispensable aid to tracing popular views and reactions in all kinds of fields, from aerial bombardment to greyhound racing. . . I stick to my idea that they are probably the richest source of material available to the social historian of the period.”

It was this which provided the basic research for The People’s War, which won him the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and was greeted with critical acclaim. Writing in The Sunday Times, Peter Wilsher described it as “a tour de force of historical reconstruction, and for anyone who grew up during 1939-45, an essay in almost unadulterated nostalgia”.

By this time, Calder had already won prizes for his poetry, and had decided that the settled life of a social historian was not enough. He spent three years at the University of Nairobi as lecturer in English, acquiring a love of Africa which never left him. He would, at various stages in his life, take up posts at Malawi University and the University of Zimbabwe, as well as teaching at Waikato in New Zealand.

His real love, however, was Scotland. In 1963 he had married Jenni Daiches, daughter of the distinguished literary historian Professor David Daiches, and they both decided that they wanted to return to live in Edinburgh. Calder claimed that he found there the democratic traditions of a nation which stretched back to the birth of Presbyterianism and which cut across classes in a way that could be found nowhere else in Britain.

In 1979 he became Reader and Staff Tutor in Arts at the Open University in Scotland, where he was to teach for the next 14 years. Revolutionary Empire, which challenged myths about British imperialism, was published in 1981, and was intended to be the first of a trilogy. Although the book won ecstatic reviews in America, the sequels never materialised. The Myth of the Blitz followed in 1991, and later, with Paul Addison, he wrote Time to Kill: The Soldier's Experience of the War in the West 1939-45.

His literary studies included Revolving Culture: Notes from the Scottish Republic (1994) and Scotlands of the Mind (2002); an edited collection of Hugh MacDiarmid’s prose, The Raucle Tongue, in three volumes (1997-98); and introductions to several classic works, including Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, Walter Scott’s Old Mortality, the poems of T. S. Eliot, and Charles Dickens's Great Expectations.

There were five volumes of poetry: Waking in Waikato (1997); a witty collection called Horace in Tollcross: Eftir Some Odes of Q. H. Flaccus (2000) which presumes that the Roman poet has been relocated to Edinburgh; Colours of Grief (2002); Dipa’s Bowl (2004); and Sun Behind the Castle: Edinburgh Poems (2004). As one critic has pointed out: “How typical that the titles span both hemispheres, several languages, and the assumption that Flaccus would be a recognisable name to all.”

With Edinburgh, however, came a temptation which Calder was never able to resist: long evenings of drinking and debate in the city’s pubs. Splendid as his company was, it often trespassed on the patience of even his most loyal friends, especially when it was followed up by telephone calls in the middle of the night to pursue some political point that had not been disposed of to his satisfaction. The stories of his drinking became legendary, and eventually led to the end of his marriage to Jenni. In 1986, he married Catherine Kyle, but once again the marriage did not survive.

There was a streak of depression in Calder’s make-up and a curious defensiveness in his character, which no reassurance from his friends could dispose of. In The Myth of the Blitz he felt the need to apologise for his accent and his background, and he often spoke of not living up to the expectation of others. “He felt there was a gold standard, perhaps that of his father, to which he did not measure up,” said one friend.

Set against this, however, was his lighter side — a love of cricket, which he played, watched and wrote about with great enjoyment, as well as a mordant wit. His book Gods, Mongrels and Demons, written in 2003, was subtitled “101 Brief but Essential Lives” and included “oddballs, tinks, heidbangers, saints, keelies, nutters, philosophers, freaks and other personages”.

He is survived by his two wives, and by his four children, a son and two daughters from his first marriage, and a son from his second.

Angus Calder, writer, historian and poet, was born on February 5, 1942. He died of lung cancer on June 5, 2008, aged 66