Historian, broadcaster who opened up past epochs to the general reader

Lord Norwich, the 2nd Viscount Norwich, who has died aged 88, was an aristocratic man of letters and, as a historian, travel writer and television personality, was better known as John Julius Norwich.

The only son of the Conservative politician, diplomat and writer Duff Cooper (who would be created Viscount Norwich in 1952) and the society beauty Lady Diana Cooper, Norwich became one of the bestknown cultural pundits of his generation. The author of numerous monumental and often multi-volume books on subjects ranging from Sicily, Venice and Byzantium to Shakespeare’s history plays and the papacy, he founded the Venice in Peril Fund and was a popular lecturer on opera and the arts.

His wit and self-deprecating good manners made him a star of the London drawing-room circuit and his facility with quips and quotations made him a favourite with broadcasters in the days when an upper-class accent was seen as no impediment to a career on the airwaves.

Norwich hosted the popular BBC radio panel game My Word! for four years. But his most successful television venture was a series on English country houses, which was exported to the United States. He also wrote and presented 30 television documentaries on subjects including the Fall of Constantinople, Napoleon’s Hundred Days, Cortes and Montezuma, the antiquities of Turkey, Maximilian of Mexico, Toussaint l’Ouverture of Haiti, the Knights of Malta and the death of the Prince Imperial in the Zulu War.

Norwich never set out to break new ground. Indeed he was sometimes criticised for putting forward theories discredited by professional historians; harsher critics suggested his books were cliched – even trivial. His mother was said to have remarked: ‘‘I don’t think I want to pick up this book of John Julius’s, as I expect I shall want to put it down almost immediately.’’

He, too, was disarmingly modest about his talents. ‘‘I have not discovered a single new historical fact in my life,’’ he conceded. ‘‘I like infecting other people with my own enthusiasm, but I am not interested in pushing back the frontiers of knowledge. Deep down, I’m shallow. I really am.’’

Yet he was adept at synthesising material from scholarly sources into an appealing narrative, and at plucking comic quotes into prominence. His books were popular because they were glossy, lucid and readable, and the sheer scale and scope of his enterprise was extraordinary.

Norwich, as Noel Malcolm observed in a review of his three-volume history of Byzantium, helped to open up epochs of human history to the general reader ‘‘much in the way that Gibbon did for the educated public of his day’’. His last book, France: A History from Gaul to de Gaulle, published in April, was an entertaining romp through 2000 years of French history.

When John Julius Cooper was born in 1929, it was with some prescience that his nanny remarked: ‘‘That baby aims to please.’’ (Trying to Please would be the title of his autobiography published in 2008.)

From an early age young John Julius was encouraged to perform for his parents’ friends. In Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, a friend of Mrs Algernon Stitch, the character based on Lady Diana, finds the eight-year-old Stitch prodigy sitting on her bed construing Virgil. ‘‘Show him your imitation of the Prime Minister,’’ implores Mrs Stitch. ‘‘Sing him your Neapolitan song, stand on your head.’’

The Coopers lavished huge affection on their only son, and protected him from any unpleasantness arising from Diana’s flirtations and Duff’s infidelities. Some accounts suggest that her husband’s affairs frequently reduced Lady Diana to tears and may even have driven her to drink, but that was not her son’s perception.

‘‘She worshipped the ground he walked on,’’ he said, ‘‘but she wasn’t highly sexed – she was quite glad that other women were taking the weight off her, as it were. I once asked her if she minded. She said: ‘They were the flowers, but I was the tree’.’’

Duff Cooper wrote that he hoped his son would never read his diaries, but Norwich published them anyway in 2005. He said he had considered editing out the rakish aspects, but decided that sexual conquest was ‘‘so much part of’’ his father’s character that it had to be left in.

The Coopers’ weekend guests included H G Wells (Russian mistress in tow), the Churchills, and Hilaire Belloc, who sang ancient French songs in a quavery voice. John Julius helped Belloc with his cloak, almost collapsing under its weight because every pocket contained a flask of spirits.

When war broke out, the 11-year-old John Julius was spirited away to prep school in Toronto. Eventually he returned to Eton, where he did not distinguish himself academically, though he won a place at New College, Oxford.

His parents moved to the British embassy in Paris in 1944. John Julius recalled an encounter with General de Gaulle at a dinner marking the second anniversary of D-Day in 1946. The 16-year-old boy had arrived late and hungry and asked if he could have the French leader’s untouched apple pie. De Gaulle agreed, but pointed out it was covered in his cigarette ash. ‘‘I said it would be an honour for me to eat his cigarette ash – an appalling piece of over-the-top flattery which I blush to recall.’’

After graduating from Oxford with a Second in Modern Languages, in 1952, following in his father’s footsteps, Cooper, as he then was, joined the Foreign Office as Third Secretary to the British Embassy in Belgrade, then as Second Secretary in Beirut. On his father’s death in 1954 he inherited the viscountcy. Ten years later he left the Diplomatic Service to become a writer and broadcaster.

In 1952 he had married Anne Clifford, daughter of Sir Bede Clifford, one-time governor of the Bahamas, with whom he had a daughter, the historian Artemis Cooper, and a son, Jason, an architect. Later, it became an open secret that he had had an illegitimate daughter with Ricki Huston, wife of the film director John Huston.

After divorcing Anne in 1983 (Allegra, his daughter by Ricki Huston, was adopted by John Huston after her mother’s death in a car accident), he married, in 1989, Mollie Philipps.

As well as serving as chairman of the Venice in Peril Fund, Norwich, who listed his recreations in Who’s Who as ‘‘sightseeing, nightclub piano’’, was co-chairman of the World Monuments Fund and a vice-president of the National Association of Decorative and Fine Art Societies. He is survived by his wife and by the children of his first marriage. – Telegraph Group