Christopher Hibbert was probably the most widely-read popular historian of our time and undoubtedly one of the most prolific.

He wrote more than 50 books as well as short stories and numerous articles and reviews. His curiosity was insatiable, ranging from King Arthur and Agincourt to Edward VII and the Battle of Arnhem.

He had a particular fascination for all things Italian, and in addition to accounts of the lives of the Medici princes, Garibaldi and Mussolini, he also wrote biographies of the cities of Rome, Florence and Venice.

Regency England and its social history absorbed him greatly too, and he penned two studies of George IV, first as Prince of Wales, then as King, and another of his father George III. But the Victorian era became an equal passion and books on Lord Raglan, Charles Dickens — whom he reread regularly — the Indian Mutiny, Benjamin Disraeli and two books on Victoria herself poured forth from Hibbert’s fecund mind.

He was cast in the mould of gentleman scholar; an astonishingly industrious and elegant writer with an easy fluency attractive to both the common reader and the academic specialist. It was not as if his subjects had not been written about many times before, and it was not as if, for the most part, he made any startling revelations; and yet his detailed and careful studies of individuals and his panoramic landscapes of a particular era were hugely absorbing and eminently readable.

He was a storyteller par excellence, enjoying a similar popular acclaim to that bestowed on Sir Arthur Bryant by a previous generation. But where Bryant’s observations had been filtered through the prism of Empire, Hibbert’s were relatively free of subjectivity and thus more appealing to the modern reader.

He won the Heinemann Award for Literature in 1962 for The Destruction of Lord Raglan. His vivid and harrowing narrative of The French Revolution (1981) was hailed by the Cambridge historian J. H. Plumb as “one of the best accounts that I know”. Similarly, his Rise and Fall of the House of Medici (1974) was praised by Sacheverell Sitwell as “excellent . . . drama and bloodshed in alliance with romance and beauty”. Rome and his other city biographies — he also wrote one of London — were masterpieces of research and were extraordinarily detailed.

Hibbert was first seduced by Italy’s charms during the war and returned again and again to delve into its past. Rome, The Biography of a City (1985) is a gripping 3,000-year chronicle of cruelty, corruption and greed set against human and artistic endeavour without equal.

One of his most labour-intensive and scholarly enterprises was The London Encyclopaedia (1983), which he edited with Ben Weinreb. Far from being a dry-as-dust compendium of facts, it was laced with quotations and amusing anecdotes and, indeed, has just been revised for the third time.

In its review of the third edition, edited by Weinreb (who died in 1999), Hibbert and Julia and John Keay, the TLS said that “scholarly information, comprehensiveness and a generally high degree of accuracy are married to conciseness, lightness of touch, and an occasional turn of humour”.

The New Statesman described Hibbert as “a pearl of biographers”.

Arthur Raymond Hibbert — he assumed the name Christopher after being nicknamed Christopher Robin in the Army — was born in Enderby, Leicestershire, in 1924, one of three siblings, to Canon Victor Hibbert and his wife Maude, and was brought up in Enderby Vicarage.