Smash hit

He was educated at Radley and Oriel College, Oxford, where he read modern history and became friends with fellow undergraduate Kingsley Amis.

His studies were interrupted by the Second World War in which he served as an infantry officer with the London Irish Rifles in the Italian campaign. He joined up in 1943, aged 19. He was awarded the Military Cross for his action during an attack on a German fortification on the River Senio and was later wounded, shot through the palm of the hand, while fighting with partisans during the battle of Lake Comacchio. In 1945 he was appointed staff captain at Allied Forces headquarters and later became personal assistant to General Alan Duff.

After the war he returned to Oxford where he met Sue Piggford, an undergraduate at St Anne’s College. She first encountered him outside the Bodleian Library where he was rummaging in his pockets and had become entangled with a pair of gloves that his mother had attached by elastic to the arms of his duffel coat. Enchanted, she asked to be introduced to him and they were married a year later, Hibbert having struggled to graduate after failing Latin (then compulsory) five times. He became a partner in a firm of auctioneers, land agents and surveyors, eventually establishing his own firm in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, where he and his wife settled and brought up three children.

In the late 1950s Hibbert started to write in his spare time and became the television critic of Truth. A radio play written by Hibbert and typed by his wife, who secretly excised some salacious scenes, was rejected by the BBC to Hibbert’s great disappointment. It was some time before Sue Hibbert confessed to her censorship. Hibbert persevered and wrote his first book, The Road to Tyburn (1957), about the London underworld, followed by King Mob (1958), an account of the Gordon Riots of 1780, and Wolfe at Quebec (1959), after which he turned to writing full time.

He anticipated a precarious existence but his wife, knowing his burning passion for history, was entirely supportive. A pattern developed of starting writing at 9am, whether he wanted to or not, and breaking for an afternoon walk or some gardening before returning to his desk until 7pm. He wrote in longhand; no typewriter.

He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and became president of the Johnson Society in 1980, having written The Personal History of Samuel Johnson in 1971 and edited Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1979). He was also made an honorary doctor of letters by the University of Leicester in 1996.

Hibbert, unlike so many creative minds, had no dark side to him. He was kind, gentle, loving, charming, witty and, by his own account, uxorious. He was a sociable man with a fund of stories that, unlike the meticulous scholarship of his books, were often embellished to such an extent that fact and fiction joined forces.

He was a lover of cats and enjoyed them jumping up on to his desk and playing with his fountain pen. They included Ginger Rogers, Trotsky who trotted, Edmund (Hillary) who climbed up the curtains, and Parker (nosy).

In addition to gardening and cooking he enjoyed walking, but could be casual about his choice of footwear. He once arrived on the summit of Great Gable in the Lake District wearing wellington boots to the incredulity of a group of hardened types who had just struggled up the rock-climbing side of the mountain.

Hibbert is survived by his wife, Sue, who was a great help to him in compiling indexes and reading proofs, and their daughter and two sons.

Christopher Hibbert, historian, was born on March 5, 1924. He died on December 21, 2008, aged 84