Sir Arthur Bryant, 85, Dies; Prolific English Historian

Sir Arthur Bryant, a prolific historian ranked in the tradition of Gibbon and Macauley and whose popular accounts of Britain’s greatest days stirred patriotic hearts for decades, is dead.

The New Hall hospital in the southwestern English city of Salisbury said Bryant died Tuesday night. He was 85.

Bryant was a historian of prodigious output and literary grace whose patriotism was considered by some critics to have influenced his objectivity, particularly in some post-World War II accounts he authored giving major credit for the victory over Germany to British leaders.

But his trilogy on Samuel Pepys was considered among the great historical biographies in the English language.

Bryant began his study of Pepys with “Samuel Pepys, the Man in the Making” in 1933, followed it with “Samuel Pepys, the Years of Peril” in 1935 and “Samuel Pepys, the Savior of the Navy” in 1938. He unearthed a vast amount of material through which he revealed the diarist to be one of the finest administrators in the history of the British Navy.

While Bryant was working on that magnum opus, he completed eight less ambitious books and still in the same period--1936--succeeded G. K. Chesterton as columnist of the Illustrated London News. He had the longest run of any columnist of his time and was still meeting deadlines while in his 80s.

He was so prolific that in 13 years--from 1931 to 1944--he researched and wrote 19 books. And from 1950 to 1975 he researched and wrote 13 more. One of his first, “Charles II” in 1931, was published within two years of the day he got the assignment to write it, and it became a best seller.

He was born into a wealthy English family and served as a pilot in World War I before entering Oxford as a history major.

He wrote his first book in 1929, “The Spirit of Conservatism,” and that brought the offer to write a new biography of Charles II.

From that came a stream of other biographies--the Duke of Wellington, Adm. Nelson and Pepys--studies of the Napoleonic Wars, the Middle Ages, the British monarchy and books about England with such titles as “The Story of England,” “The Age of Chivalry,” “The Fire and the Rose.”

He was knighted in 1954 for his contributions to the war effort in World War II.