Anthony Nares, managing director, Centaur Comms

Anthony Nares, founder of Marketing Week and managing director of Centaur Communications – which owns the title – died in a skiing accident last Monday. He was 53.

He will be remembered as a highly energetic, debonair figure whose uncompromising pursuit of creative publishing ideas was always highly stimulating.

Above all, his colleagues will miss his human decency. “He had great courage, great energy and great integrity. I don’t remember him committing an unkind act in the 25 years I have known him,” says Graham Sherren, chief executive of Centaur. He was widely known, and widely liked, outside the company.

Son of a WWII Fleet Air Arm pilot, Anthony Nares was educated at Charterhouse and in France, where he became a highly accomplished linguist. He spoke French and Spanish fluently; later he mastered German.

From an early age, he displayed the restless, effervescent qualities which became his hallmark. Entrepreneurial instinct led him to abandon school and try his hand at a variety of projects. At one point, he sold encyclopedias in Argentina. After a short-service commission in the Blues, and stint as a copywriter at Young & Rubicam, he became managing director of a marketing consultancy .

Here, in the early Seventies, he met Graham Sherren, then head of Morgan Grampian. It was the beginning of a business and personal relationship which proved decisive in tilting Anthony Nares towards magazine publishing. In 1978, he set up Marketing Week with private backing. Michael Chamberlain, ex-editor of Campaign, was his partner and the magazine’s first editor.

In 1982 Centaur, headed by Graham Sherren and John Raw, acquired Marketing Week Communications. Anthony Nares became a significant shareholder and a driving executive force within the enlarged company.

Anthony Nares was an outstanding skier and waterskier.

He leaves a wife and young son.