Philip Ziegler, biographer of Britain’s powerful and pivotal, 93

Philip Ziegler, a prolific biographer and historian who unspooled tales of British power and prestige including former prime ministers and the royal intrigue of Edward VIII and his decision to leave the throne for love, died Feb. 22 at his home in London. He was 93.

His literary agent, Caroline Dawnay, said Ziegler had cancer.

Over more than four decades, Ziegler showed a restless curiosity with subjects ranging from London during the World War II air-raid blitzes to the horrors of the bubonic plague in medieval Britain and across Europe. Yet his gaze was mostly on his homeland and the personalities and institutions that helped shape it.

His own life gave him a grounding in the rarefied worlds he chronicled — as well as the forces that have molded Britain’s modern identity. Ziegler attended the elite schools Eton and Oxford. He then served in the British foreign service during an era when Britain’s colonial power was unraveling, and returned to Britain on the cusp of the social and economic upheavals of the 1960s and ‘70s.

“The biographer’s first responsibility is to the truth and to the reader,” Ziegler said in a 2011 interview. “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.”

Some of the subjects he explored had built-in name recognition: the Barings banking empire (“The Sixth Great Power,” 1988); the founder of the Rhodes scholarships (“Legacy: Cecil Rhodes,” 2008); and Lord Louis Mountbatten (“Mountbatten,” 1985), a member of the royal family and naval officer who was killed in a bomb blast by the Irish Republican Army in 1979.

Other lives he examined were less prominent yet offered windows into the vanities of Britain’s social swells and blue bloods. His 1981 biopic “Diana Cooper” recounted the life of a beguiling aristocrat who was the inspiration for author Evelyn Waugh’s character Algernon Stitch in his 1938 satire on journalism, “Scoop.”

In 2004, Ziegler’s “Man of Letters” chronicled maverick British publisher Rupert Hart-Davis, who edited the first edition of the collected letters of Oscar Wilde that shed new light into the libertine writer. Ziegler’s 1999 biography “Osbert Sitwell” revisited the life of a minor British poet who cast a wider celebrity as a magnet for artists and iconoclasts.