Humphrey Carpenter, who died Tuesday at Oxford, England, at age 58, was an accomplished and often controversial biographer whose readiness to probe and disclose the sex lives of his subjects was variously regarded as honest and unflinching, or prurient and attention-seeking.

His biography of Benjamin Britten raised eyebrows at the time, and his claims that Dennis Potter frequented prostitutes enraged the playwright’s family. His life of Archbishop Runcie, an old friend of his father, attracted acres of coverage after its subject complained that he felt betrayed and declared that he wished he had died before the book appeared.

The most amiable of men, Carpenter seemed unfazed by the sporadic cries of outrage his biographies inspired and was equally unconcerned when savaged himself, not least by his near contemporary and fellow biographer, novelist A.N. Wilson, who – incensed by the Runcie furor – once wrote of how “Humphrey dashes hither and thither, exuding sweat, halitosis and dandruff.”

Much dashing was called for, since Carpenter was a prodigiously hard worker, matched only by Wilson himself. In addition to writing innumerable biographies, many of them the size and shape of a brick, he was a tireless reviewer, an incomparable broadcaster, a multitalented musician, the author of children’s books, and a theatrical impresario-cum-playwright. His last years were blighted by Parkinson’s disease, but – to the amazement and envy of his peers – he remained as active as ever, dictating his books into the kind of computer that recognizes its master’s voice, broadcasting from Pebble Mill in Birmingham, and hurrying up to London to attend publishers’ parties, where – unable to stand for long at a time – he held court in a corner of the room, showing far more interest in the doings of his friends and their families than in boasting of his own achievements.

Humphrey William Bouverie Carpenter was born on April 29, 1946. He grew up in Oxford, and apart from a short spell in London working for the BBC, he spent the rest of his life in the city. His father was appointed warden of Keble College, Oxford, and young Humphrey spent happy hours pedaling around the gaunt Victorian quad on his tricycle.

According to Mr. Wilson, then at the height of his indignation vis-a-vis the Runcie biography, the boy Carpenter was “a hyperactive little creature whose uncontrollable noisiness and smelliness were a constant source of irritation and dismay” to his parents. Carpenter himself attributed his tireless energy and readiness to keep countless balls in the air at once to the fact that, as an only child, he was not allowed to be bored and was kept constantly active by his mother. His father went on to become the bishop of Oxford.

Carpenter read English at Keble and joined the BBC as a general trainee in 1968.He worked as a producer at Radio Oxford for four years from 1970, and it was there that he honed his exceptional skills as a broadcaster. He combined knowledge and enthusiasm with a friendly and genial tone of voice and the kind of accent that came to be disapproved of in the BBC’s desperate hunt for “regional” voices.

Carpenter’s career as a writer began on his own doorstep, when he and his wife published a Companion to the Thames in 1975. From topography he graduated to biography: His life of JRR Tolkien was published in 1977 and was swiftly followed by a group biography of the Inklings (who included Tolkien’s friends C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams), which won the Somerset Maugham Award. His biography of W.H. Auden won the E.M. Forster Award in 1984, and that of Ezra Pound the Duff Cooper Prize; the life of Benjamin Britten was awarded a Royal Philharmonic Society Award.

Exhausting and exhaustive biographies were interlaced with lighter and more generalized literary surveys: these included “The Brideshead Generation,” an account of Evelyn Waugh, Brian Howard, and Harold Acton’s set at Oxford, and “The Third Program,” an evocation of American writers in Paris between the wars. His controversial biography of Archbishop Runcie was followed by lives of Dennis Potter and Spike Milligan.

Carpenter longed, in vain, to be a novelist, but his ability to tell a good story coincided with a lifelong interest in children’s literature, made manifest in the “Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature” and his “Secret Gardens: The Golden Age of Children’s Literature.” He did publish the hugely successful Mr. Majeika books, which recounted the adventures of a kindly wizard. Carpenter claimed that, after brooding on the matter, it took him three days to produce a new story. They were serialized on television, and “Mr. Majeika: The Musical” was staged at Oxford and at the Shaw Theatre in the Euston Road. Carpenter’s father died just as the play was about to open, and his funeral was delayed as a result. (“Thank God for the deep freeze,” Carpenter was reported as saying.)

A versatile musician who played the piano, the tuba, the bass saxophone, and the double bass, Carpenter founded in 1983 a band called Vile Bodies, which specialized in 1930s music and performed for many years at the Ritz; its members included publishers and Oxford dons.

Carpenter once declared that he could be recognized by his “purple shirt, no tie, shabby green trousers, untidy grey hair and long nose.” The most likeable and friendly of men, he spoke in a low, conspiratorial mutter, wore spectacles on a cord dangling around his neck and carried a mobile phone (often used) in his trouser pocket; with his alert, bright eyes he resembled Rat or Mole at their most benign and engaging.

Like three of his subjects – Waugh, Britten, and Pound – he was given to bouts of depression; he bore the travails of Parkinson’s disease with exemplary fortitude and good humor. He combined affability, good humor, and a chaotic exterior with professionalism, punctuality, and, as readers of his book reviews were aware, a gift for the lethal demolition job.

Carpenter died shortly after returning from a family holiday in France: He had recently completed another Mr. Majeika story.