The prolific historian and biographer Philip Ziegler, who has died of cancer aged 93, was never less than scrupulously fair – but also honest – about the shortcomings of his subjects, who included some of the most prominent men and, occasionally, women of modern British history.
Lord Mountbatten’s personal vanity, deviousness and ambition, Edward VIII’s meanness and superficiality, even Edward Heath’s charmlessness were all remorselessly revealed, even though they amounted to official biographies and are books that have shaped the men’s reputations for posterity.
“The biographer’s first responsibility is to the truth and to the reader. If he is not prepared in the last resort to hurt and offend people for whom he feels nothing except goodwill then he should not be writing a biography,” Ziegler said in 2011.
The foibles of Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India before independence, were such that Ziegler wrote a note on his desk while writing the biography in the mid-1980s stating: “Remember, in spite of everything, he was a great man.” That is not necessarily the view any longer of many British and Indian historians, though it is hard to overlook Mountbatten’s significance to the modern subcontinent and his relatives in the Royal family.
If Ziegler’s patrician, establishment status and urbane charm helped to smooth his path to selection for such monumental biographies, his industry and the punctiliousness of his research meant that they come close to definitive. He said: “Ideally the biographer should know everything about his subject and then discard 99% of his information, keeping only the essential. Of course one can never hope to discover anything approaching everything, but one can find out a great deal.”
Ziegler was born in Ringwood, in the New Forest, to Dora (nee Barnwell) and Louis Ziegler, a retired army major. He was educated at Eton college and then studied law at New College, Oxford, graduating with a first. After national service with the Royal Artillery, he entered the Foreign Office, serving as a diplomat in Laos, Paris and Pretoria.
In 1966, with his wife Sarah (nee Collins), whom he had married in 1960, and two small children, he was posted to Bogotá, Colombia, as head of chancery at the British embassy. It was there the following year that, returning home from an embassy reception, he and his wife found armed robbers rifling the house. Sarah was killed in the melee and he was badly wounded.
The tragedy persuaded him to leave the diplomatic service and take a job with Sarah’s publisher father, William Collins, then the head of one of the largest publishing houses in the country. Ziegler became editorial director in 1972 and editor-in-chief of the company seven years later. He had already published two books, a biography of the Duchess of Dino, mistress of the wily French diplomat Talleyrand, in 1962, and one of the Georgian prime minister Henry Addington (later the reactionary home secretary Viscount Sidmouth) in 1965. A book about the Black Death followed in 1969, though that was to be his only venture into pre-modern history, and one on the battle of Omdurman (1973), as well as biographies of William IV (1971) and the Victorian prime minister Lord Melbourne (1976).
In 1980, Ziegler became a full-time writer, and a regular and eclectic stream of books followed: biographies of the 1920s’ society beauty Lady Diana Cooper (1981), Harold Wilson (1993), the minor poet Osbert Sitwell (1998), the publisher Rupert Hart-Davis (2005) and the actor Laurence Olivier (2013), as well as Heath (2010), Mountbatten (1985) and Edward VIII (1990), and a short biography of George VI (2014). There were also histories of Barings Bank (1988), London during the second world war (1995), the Rhodes Trust in Oxford (2008) and Brooks’s gentlemen’s club (1991). Not forgetting, Elizabeth’s Britain 1926 to 1986 and a book of photographic portraits of the Queen (2010).
All were assiduously researched. Given access to the royal archives, Ziegler ploughed through 25,000 letters of Edward VIII, revealing the shallowness of the king who abdicated and, allegedly to her displeasure, the Queen Mother’s relentless hostility towards him. His verdict that Edward was well meaning and that no monarch could have been more anxious to relieve the sufferings of his subjects though “few can have done less to achieve their aim”, was suitably waspish.
The biography of Mountbatten, for which he was chosen by the Broadlands trustees, custodians of his legacy, was followed by three volumes of the admiral’s diaries. The biography of Heath was also both official and comprehensive, but struggled to find the man’s elusive charm.
Of the Olivier biography, he told an interviewer at the Cheltenham literary festival in 2013: “In the course of my alarmingly long biographical career I have written about an inordinate number of prime ministers, kings and the like and I suddenly decided in old age that I would indulge myself and do myself an actor.” What he found to his alarm that there was very little substance beneath the parts the great actor played.
Following the death of his first wife, Ziegler married Clare Charrington, a social worker and bereavement counsellor, in 1971. She died in 2017. He is survived by the two children of his first marriage, Sophie and Colin, and by the son of his second, Toby.
• Philip Sandeman Ziegler, biographer and historian, born 24 December 1929; died 22 February 2023
