Izaak Walton was the Compleat Angler. Michael Davie was the Compleat Journalist. In the 17th century, Walton lived to be 90; Davie died in peace at Chaucer Cottage, in Oxfordshire, one night last week, aged 81. For six decades, he had been what he called "a scribbler". An Observer journalist from 1950 to 1977, he was, in the 1970s, deputy to David Astor, one of the great editors of the postwar era. After a period as editor of the Age in Melbourne (1979-81), he returned to the Observer until his retirement in 1988.
Davie was an Anglo-Saxon internationalist. As a linguist, he confessed himself to be humdrum, but wherever the English language prevailed, he could feel at home. He was a lifelong devotee of both the United States and Australia.
Five of his books had a transatlantic or Commonwealth flavour: his life of Lyndon Johnson (1966), a book about California (1971), his account of the Titanic (1986), the biography he wrote with his second wife, Anne Chisholm, of Lord Beaverbrook (1988) and the volume called Anglo-Australian Attitudes (2001). The Beaverbrook was probably his most admired book, fair to its subject's achievements, yet candid about the Canadian's control freakery.
Davie was born into modest prosperity in Cranleigh, Surrey. He was sent to Haileybury school, and kept loosely in touch with a handful of his bright schoolfellows. His first love was English but, in retrospect, he acknowledged as his first real mentor a gifted teacher named Martin Wight, a distinguished historian and pacifist. It was Wight who later provided a link to Astor, Davie's second and principal mentor.
Haileybury, through its connections with the Raj and the Imperial Service College, also left Davie with a soft spot for lingering aspects of post-imperial Britain. More conventionally, the school developed his interest in sport: he played in the cricket XI with Alan Ross, whom he later, as sports editor, introduced to the Observer as its literate cricket commentator.
In 1942-43, Davie had a year at Merton College, Oxford, being tutored by Edmund Blunden. Then he was recruited into the navy (his brother was an RN regular), and for part of the period rather enjoyed its self-confident air. With the return of peace he went back to Oxford, this time reading modern history. As an undergraduate, he began to show a side of his character that, in his later career, both satisfied and amused him: he became a leading member of the Stubbs Society, an elitist group named after the Victorian polymath bishop. For Davie cast himself as both an insider and an outsider. He liked to be on the inside track - in the know, up with the gossip, trivial or tempestuous. Yet like most first-class journalists, he could be impeccably discreet and sagely protective of his sources. He was the opposite of an egotist, being neither boastful nor conceited, but his professional personality had a streak of the kindly egoist to it. As an insider, he conserved his own status and standpoint. As an outsider, he kept his distance from all powers and principalities. He thought of himself as a reporter, and believed that the greatest of compliments was to be regarded as a "good reporter".
Part of his skill derived from his capacity for awe and/or amazement. Once, in 1953, on a skiing holiday, we sat over drinks in the Alpine sun. A waiter brought the news of Stalin's death. Instantly, Michael was electrified from physical slump to sharp focus. He had the rest of us on mental alert in seconds. A cosmologist in our group said he understood for the first time how a political death could be as startling as the discovery of a new star.
Davie also recognised that, as instant historians, journalists can be easily wrongfooted by the speed and deception of events. He was a shrewd admirer of some American reporting; a fan of HL Mencken and AJ Liebling, he envied their more leisurely deadlines. He had special praise for the role of the fact checkers at the New Yorker.
Such scholarly procedures, however, are often at hazard when news is breaking. At the Observer, in the 1950s and 60s, subediting had to be done with caution. Davie himself was reluctant to rewrite others' copy, but he made an exception for the political journalist Nora Beloff, a seasoned staffer with a nose for genuine news. She trusted Davie to snowplough the avalanche of her copy into clarity, and they often worked together on contributions by others. In 1963, when Mark Arnold-Forster reported that Alec Douglas-Home was emerging as the next Conservative leader, Davie and Beloff were incredulous. Their doubt and checking, maybe rightly, led to missing a scoop.
Davie was incarnate with charm; he was an artist at picking other's brains without giving offence. Both men and women thought him good-looking, and he retained a boyish air. His prime gift was for concentration; when he was interested, his glance never wavered. Watching cricket, his attention was as immovable as a Boycott or a Ponting. He was a spectator of acute talent, and that was also the making of him as a journalist. His speed of reaction, his excitability, his wryness and detachment made him, too, an ideal editor for the Evelyn Waugh diaries (1976), though Davie himself was what he called "a middle-stump Anglican".
Anne survives him, as do the son and two daughters of his first marriage.
· Michael Davie, journalist, born January 15 1924; died December 7 2005