THE SEVEN LIVES OF JOHN MURRAY: THE STORY OF A PUBLISHING DYNASTY

Humphrey Carpenter (John Murray, £25)

Humphrey Carpenter's untimely death in January 2005 took from us a biographer of versatility and a broadcaster of virtuosity. Sometimes, he married the two activities. I remember a day in Broadcasting House producing him doing links for two programmes on (how apt) the state of publishing in the late 1980s: while inserts were being played, he would take out a sheaf of cards to work on whatever biography he was preparing at the time, ready when the green light flickered to return to his radio script.

It was he who had suggested to me that we should make these programmes on publishing, having spotted exactly the right moment, as the old gentleman' publishers were being swallowed up by conglomerates.

Fifteen years later, it was entirely understandable that Humphrey took on - for what was to be his last book - a biography of exactly that sort of publishing house.

In 2002, he was at a launch party at the famous John Murray London headquarters at 50 Albemarle Street and started talking to the wife of John Murray VII, an archivist. Within months, Carpenter was contracted to write the firm's history and had provided a first draft by the time of his death (I must declare an interest in that I am given an acknowledgement for having helped him with references to Arthur Conan Doyle).

The Murray archive is an extraordinarily full one and the authors who were published by the family are equally extraordinary. The firm started life in Fleet Street in 1768, when John MacMurray bought a bookselling business at No 32.

It was, however, his son John Murray II who was in the right place at the right time and put the firm on the London - and world - publishing map. Carpenter could not fail with a cast-list including Coleridge, Jane Austen and Lady Caroline Lamb. Famously, that second Murray engineered a meeting between two of his other authors at No 50 - can you imagine the encounter between Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron?

Later, Murray published the likes of David Livingstone, Herman Melville and Conan Doyle, then at the height of his success with Sherlock Holmes.

Humphrey Carpenter was adept at multi-person biographies like The Inklings and The Brideshead Generation. This clever history of a great publishing house covers seven generations, nearly 250 years and is a fitting tribute to a publishing family whose name may well disappear now that it has been bought out by - yes - a conglomerate.