In 1973, Anthony Holden, who has died aged 76 following a brain tumour, was hired by Harold Evans as a home and foreign reporter for the Sunday Times. This marked the start of his career as a correspondent, feature writer and editor of various sections of national titles that he worked on. Early recognition came through a 1976 British Press award for his coverage of events in Northern Ireland.
The following year Evans made Tony editor of the Atticus diary column and he got the columnist award. His copy was always impeccable and he had the gift of turning any event or meeting with prominent people into a perfectly pitched anecdote.
Wry profiles of the then Prince of Wales led to the first of 13 books on the royal family, Charles, Prince of Wales (1979). His second biography of the future king, Charles (1988), exposed the emptiness of his marriage to Diana, and caused palace consternation.
In 1979 Tony went to Washington as US editor for the Observer. There he met up with Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis, fellow scribblers from his time as a student at Oxford.
However, in 1981 he was back working for Evans, now as features editor and assistant editor of the Times. Evans saw Tony as his successor, but both men reckoned without the baleful influence of Rupert Murdoch: he made it clear when he bought the Times and Sunday Times that year that he would make the papers full-on supporters of Margaret Thatcher and her policies. When in 1982 Murdoch fired Evans, Tony resigned in solidarity.
From then on Tony was a freelance journalist – particularly as a columnist for the Daily Mail and Daily Express – and author, with two spells attached to newspapers. In 1985-86 he was executive editor of Today, in charge of the Sunday edition. This was a mid-market tabloid launched by the regional press entrepreneur Eddy Shah.
Its computer-based technology and extensive use of colour proved over-ambitious, and when Tiny Rowland bought the operation Tony left.
For six years from 2002 Tony was music critic of the Observer, having already produced a biography of Tchaikovsky (1995). In the BBC TV Omnibus programme Who Killed Tchaikovsky? (1993) he examined the evidence that the composer’s death from cholera may have resulted from pressure to take his own life because of his homosexuality.
With his first wife, Amanda Warren, Tony translated the libretto of Mozart’s Don Giovanni for English National Opera (1986). Later he explored the life of the original librettist in Lorenzo da Ponte: The Man Who Wrote Mozart (2006).
His more than 30 books also included William Shakespeare: His Life and Work (1999), one of the first to explore Shakespeare’s secret Catholicism; a biography of one of the dramatist’s great interpreters, Olivier (1988); and the story of a 19th-century critic, eassayist and poet, The Wit in the Dungeon: The Life of Leigh Hunt (2005). Edited with his son Ben were two delightful anthologies, Poems That Make Grown Men Cry (2014) and Poems That Make Grown Women Cry (2016). Definitely intended to entertain were The Oscars (1993) and two that each came out of a year of playing poker professionally – Big Deal (1990) and Bigger Deal (2007).
Born in Southport, Lancashire, Tony was the son of Margaret (nee Sharpe) and John Holden, who owned a sports shop. His footballer grandfather Ivan Sharpe won a gold medal playing for England at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm. Sharpe went on to a long career in football journalism, including an interview with Benito Mussolini about the sport.
From Trearddur House school, Anglesey, and Oundle school, Nothamptonshire, Tony went in 1966 to Merton College, Oxford, where I first met him and became a lifelong friend. He was quickly dubbed “Golden Holden” as everything he turned his hand to won fans, including stars of OUDS, the university drama society, for which he directed plays, and writers for the student magazine Isis, which he edited.
He studied English but scrambled his school Greek into a translation of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon that was put on at Delphi in Greece in 1968 with a student cast. That work also provided the libretto for the premiere of a new opera by a student composer, Richard Morris, put on by the Oxford University Opera Club, led by Amanda.
On graduating Tony became a trainee reporter for the Evening Echo in Hemel Hempstead, and a local trial gave him the subject of his first book, The St Albans Poisoner (1975). In 1972 he was named young journalist of the year, and his move to the Sunday Times followed.
His politics – always on the left, with a twinkle in his eye – became resolutely republican. He hosted dinners and denounced the royals as making any modernisation of the British state all but impossible.
A serious stroke in 2017 barely slowed him down as he typed every day with his one good right hand and gave lunches where doctors’ advice was ignored and bottles were opened. His final book was Based on a True Story: A Writer’s Life (2021).
In a trade where schadenfreude is often the norm, Tony was the loyalest of loyal friends, which is why he had so many all his life.
Tony and Amanda married in 1971, and they went on to have three sons, Sam, Joe and Ben. After their divorce in 1988 Amanda kept his surname, and continued as a leading librettist and translator until her death in 2021. In 1990 Tony married Cindy (Cynthia) Blake, whom he had hired as a columnist for Today. They separated in 2000, but did not divorce.
He is survived by his sons.
• Anthony Ivan Holden, journalist and auther, born 22 May 1947; died 7 October 2023
