Humphrey Carpenter

Humphery Carpenter was an English biographer, author and radio broadcaster. He was born, died, and lived practically all of his life in the city of Oxford. His large output of books includes biographies of J R R Tolkien (1977) (also editor of The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien), W.H. Auden (1981), Ezra Pound (1988), Benjamin Britten (1992), Robert Runcie (1997), and Spike Milligan (2004). He also wrote histories of BBC Radio 3, on which he was a regular broadcaster, and of the British satire boom of the 1960s. His "Mr Majeika" series of children's books enjoyed considerable popularity and were successfully adapted for television. He was also a talented amateur jazz musician and an accomplished player of the piano, the saxophone, and the double-bass. His early death was the result of heart failure, compounded by the Parkinson's disease from which he had suffered for several years.