HOUSE HISTORIES represent a somewhat specialised literary art form. Institutions, whether they be mining companies, department stores or newspapers themselves, tend to produce them when they have some anniversary to celebrate. Thus in 1971 David Ayerst published an admirable life-story of The Manchester Guardian, which he boldly sub-titled Biography of A Newspaper.

The book was designed to commemorate that paper’s 150th birthday, and the very next year The Sunday Times did precisely the same thing, although in its case the title was perhaps the slightly less felicitous The Pearl of Days.

The official history of The Times has never, however, belonged to that genre. Admittedly, its first volume was published in 1935 — again to mark the milestone of the paper having existed for 150 years. But since then, and through six succeeding volumes, it has taken the form of a rolling narrative seeking to tell the story not merely of how a particular institution fared but also of the contemporaneous ways in which the life of the nation changed alongside it.

This latest volume shows that process catching up with events (it concludes in 2002, just taking in the appointment from the Financial Times of Robert Thomson, the present Editor).

Only the BBC has, I think, ever embarked on so ambitious a project — and at the moment Asa Briggs’s five-volume magnum opus is still stuck in the 1970s, although a further volume by another hand is said to be under preparation.

How has this unique effort on the part of a newspaper to tell its own story and to blend it with a continuing chronicle of the national circumstances through which it lived worked out in practice? The only honest answer is that the results have been variable.

The first four volumes, taking the history of The Times to half-way through the last century, were — in accordance with the paper’s custom of the period of never carrying by-lines — all published anonymously. Not surprisingly, there is a pretty strong flavour of committee prose, to say nothing of a predominantly defensive tone in face of any criticisms or controversy.

The series came to life only with Iverach McDonald’s brave account of some of the paper’s most challenging years, those marking the sunset of the long Astor proprietorship, which ended in 1966.

One of the most loyal servants The Times has had (and a man who was deeply disappointed at not being made Editor once Roy Thomson became the new proprietor in 1966), McDonald, no doubt, saw his task as something of a consolation prize. But even if there is an elegiac note to his approach, he at least made a respectable stab at presenting an authentic portrait of an essentially Establishment institution that found itself increasingly at sea in the modern world. (“Top People ” may have continued to “take The Times” but, given that that the paper chose to promote itself in that way, it was not perhaps surprising that not many others felt disposed to follow suit.) It was not, however, McDonald’s worthy volume — first published towards the end of 1984 to coincide with the celebration of the paper’s 200th birthday at the start of 1985 — that posed the real challenge for the author of this latest addition to the oeuvre.

The relatively youthful Graham Stewart (he is only 36 and thus can have little direct memory of the earlier public events with which he has to deal) is the victim of a more substantial misfortune than that. It is only a dozen years since John Grigg, his immediate predecessor, produced a truly dazzling work on what its author called “The Thomson Years”, and this latest contribution (complete with its echo of a subtitle, rashly definitive though it may seem to be) inevitably invites comparison with what went before.

Of course, in some ways, Grigg had it easier. He was required to cover a span of 15 years rather than 21 and, above all, had the consolation and comfort of writing about a single editorship, that of William Rees-Mogg, about whom Grigg, who died four years ago, contrived to write with a quite remarkable perception.

Poor Stewart faced a far more formidable task. Instead of being able to concentrate on a single Editor, he found himself forced to assess the contribution of five successive ones — in itself an indication (as in the case of the Daily Express) that these really were troubled years. On the whole, the latest Times historian succeeds in holding the ring with objectivity, if with a slight bias in favour of management decisions (or, perhaps more accurately, proprietorial whims). If the author is unfair to anyone, it is probably to Harold Evans, the first, and shortest-serving, of the various men whom Rupert Murdoch has personally appointed to the Editor’s chair. Some may also conclude that the author is a mite less than generous to Simon Jenkins, who was brought in to perform a specific task — to get The Independent’s tanks off The Times lawn — and, far from having “failed” in it, fulfilled it.

A political historian by trade, with a splendid book on the Churchill and Chamberlain dynasties already to his credit, Stewart is at his strongest when he has a self-contained episode to relate. He tells the story of the 1983 notorious Hitler Diaries hoax with verve and brio, roundly calling it “a fiasco” and quoting a staff member as saying that he regarded it as the paper’s “most embarrassing moment” in his 30 years of working on The Times. (We do not, alas, at least in this version, get Murdoch’s own somewhat more robust subsequent comment: “After all, we’re in the entertainment business.”)

Where the book falls short lies in its efforts to mix the domestic life of a newspaper — involving personality clashes, policy disagreements, commercial misjudgments — with the national and international events going on at the same time. That is never going to be an easy trick to pull off, but Grigg managed it triumphantly in the volume immediately preceding this one. The Thomson Years even included a helpful appendix containing a two-column table listing what were called “Outside Events” and “Events on The Times” opposite each other.

That is not a feature repeated here, possibly the result of a tacit acknowledgement on the part of its author that this is one area in which he he has not been able to compete with the achievement of his quite exceptional predecessor.

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