Levin, (Henry) Bernard (1928–2004), writer and broadcaster
by Bel Mooney

Levin, (Henry) Bernard (1928–2004), writer and broadcaster, was born on 19 August 1928 at University College Hospital, London, the only son of Philip Levin, journeyman tailor, and his wife, Rose, née Racklin. His father left the family when Bernard and his elder sister, Judith, were small and as a result they were brought up mainly by their maternal grandparents, who had arrived from Lithuania at the turn of the century. As an adult Levin would recall their stories about Russia and reading to them in Yiddish. In 1995 he wrote:

My home was not a religious one; my grandfather read the scriptures to himself silently and struggled through a little English; my grandmother, who could speak no English at all, lit a candle on the appropriate days, as did my mother, although for her it was not really a religious sign. (The Times, 6 Oct 1995)

The family lived in Camden Town, and Levin, encouraged by his mother, won a London county council scholarship to Christ's Hospital in Sussex. There he felt somewhat alienated as a Jewish child in a Church of England establishment, and also as a self-styled communist surrounded by pupils from a very different background. Small stature and a lack of sporting ability did not help. Jeers put iron in his soul. He found the London School of Economics a more sympathetic environment, surrounded as he was by talented peers who shared his spirit of left-wing idealism and iconoclastic enquiry, and coming under the influence of brilliant minds like Harold Laski and Karl Popper. There he began to hone the journalistic and debating skills that were to turn him into one of the most brilliant and controversial polemical journalists of his generation. He wrote for the university newspaper, The Beaver, and magazine, Clare Market Review, including articles about opera, a lifelong passion.

After graduating from the LSE in 1952 Levin took a lowly job with the BBC North American Service, but the moment of truth—literally—came in 1953, when he read an advertisement for editorial staff in the weekly paper Truth. The editor, George Scott, allegedly gave Levin a job because he was Jewish and he wished the paper to be seen in a different light. He must never have regretted this whim, because Levin soon showed outstanding ability. His first article was about his disillusion with the Labour Party, and, sharing an office with journalists of the calibre of Philip Oakes and Alan Brian, Levin developed still further that enthusiastically combative streak that was to become the chief characteristic of his journalism. He joined The Spectator in 1956, invited by the proprietor–editor Ian Gilmour to write about politics. So he began to write under the pseudonym Taper, which was to make his reputation as a lacerating wit who divided politicians into good and bad with no shades of liberal grey in between. Brian Inglis (who was to become a lifelong friend) succeeded Gilmour as editor and Levin became his deputy, a role he held until 1962. Meanwhile he had begun a parallel career as a theatre critic at the Daily Express, and from 1962 to 1970 he worked at the Daily Mail in the same capacity, excoriating indifferent plays with the same vigour he had employed on pompous politicians. He loved the theatre (and dressing up to attend performances) but became disillusioned with modern examples of the form from those he saw as young men with nothing to say. He himself went on finding much to say, and for five years wrote a column for the Daily Mail on five days a week.

While still on Truth, Levin had been invited by the Manchester Guardian to write a Saturday television column, where he was notably punchy in his criticism of a form with which, in truth, he never had much sympathy. When in 1963 he became a television star himself on That Was the Week That Was he was on the receiving end of a very public punch that delighted those who had come to dislike his abrasive monologues on the people and issues that most annoyed him. On live television a member of the audience confronted him over a bad review of his actress wife, and Levin was knocked off the high stool that was his trademark. He climbed straight back and continued. At Levin's memorial service Sir David Frost remembered those years, and how his fellow presenter chose to deal with irritating correspondents, beginning his letters with ‘I felt I should let you know that an unregistered lunatic has obtained a supply of your notepaper’. That Was the Week That Was turned Bernard Levin into a household name as journalism alone could never do.

During the week of the 1970 general election Levin wrote impartially on both sides then nailed his colours to the mast, advising his Daily Mail readers to vote Labour. Thrice was he summoned by increasing ranks of his superiors and asked to change his copy, in response to which he defiantly reminded them all of his contract, in which it was stated that he should have complete freedom. In the end he resigned, was inundated with offers, and chose The Times, edited by William Rees-Mogg. He was to stay with the newspaper until the end of his career, finding its conservative-liberal position on most issues in tune with his own—even though at first he feared he would be too radical for its pages. Rees-Mogg would later recall how Levin's disillusion with some of the ideals he had embraced rendered him a ‘true Whig’ like himself. Offered an office of his own, Levin refused its isolation but chose a desk in the anteroom to the editor's office—thus placing himself securely at the centre of things. He became, Rees-Mogg wrote, ‘an advisor of the kind that most editors need but few are lucky enough to find’ (The Times, 16 Aug 2004). That was the unofficial side of a writer whose columns, three times a week for many years, once a week from 1995, attracted a huge following.

Introducing his first collection of journalism (Taking Sides, 1979) Levin explained his remit:

My own complete liberty to choose my subject has enabled me to indulge to the full (some would say to the brimming over) my devotion to the pursuit of hares of the most extraordinary diversity. It is just as well that there is no alleyway too narrow, ill-lit or obviously without issue for me to feel impelled to wander up it; I could not possibly write a general column three times a week if I were not inquisitive, to the point of impertinence, about almost everything.

Levin's style reflected the energetic, sceptical, passionate nature of a mind that accepted only the constraints of classical grammar, using its complex and lengthy structures of clause and sub-clause to express subtlety of thought, knockabout invective, and barely harnessed emotion. Whether he was writing about his own mother's tussles with the North Thames Gas Board, or excoriating Chairman Mao, the Soviet Union, or the apartheid regime of South Africa, or defending the free speech of those he profoundly disagreed with, Levin's many readers admired his ability to surprise (praising popular films like E. T. and Crocodile Dundee) and inspire (when he wrote about Beethoven, Shakespeare, or any great art) as well as provoke. His Times column appeared for twenty-six years (with one or two periods off) and, despite his initial reluctance to collect what he saw as ‘ephemera’, he republished many of his columns in Taking Sides (1979), Speaking Up (1982), The Way We Live Now (1984), In These Times (1986), All Things Considered (1988), Now Read On (1990), If You Want My Opinion (1992), I Should Say So (1995), and the last volume, rather poignantly entitled Enough Said (1998). At that point he calculated that he had written some seventeen million words.

Levin did not, however, consider collections of journalism ‘proper’ books. His first in that category was The Pendulum Years (1970), an entertaining and perceptive analysis of the 1960s. In 1980 he visited twelve music festivals around the world to make a series of broadcasts for the BBC, which journeys also turned into a book, Conducted Tour (1981), that was part travelogue, part appreciation of the music. Naturally he returned to the subject of music in the book that some friends considered his best, Enthusiasms (1983), an eclectic journey of the mind around those things—from food to Shakespeare—in which the author took most delight. Levin held this book to be his closest to an autobiography. In the 1980s he made three travel series for Channel 4, each of which was accompanied by a book: Hannibal's Footsteps (1985), To the End of the Rhine (1987), and A Walk up Fifth Avenue (1989). Levin had never had much time for television, and watched very little, but enjoyed the camaraderie of the television crew perhaps more than the writing of books—since, as he grew older, he regarded writing as something of a chore, even it was the means of earning what proved to be a very good living. His last ‘whole’ book was an investigation of utopian dreams: A World Elsewhere (1994), but the writing of it was made more difficult by the onset of illness. In 1990 he was appointed CBE.

Levin never married, although he came closest to that state in his long relationship with the Greek writer and socialite Arianna Stassinopoulos (b. 1950), and for the last ten years of his life found contentment with the journalist Elisabeth Jane (Liz) Anderson, who was his devoted companion until the end. He fell in love very easily, and admitted that his occasional love affairs with married women were a convenient means of avoiding commitment, even if they caused him pain. His great gift was friendship with both men and women; he was the most loyal and attentive of friends and would readily acknowledge how love, friendship, and music were the only things with the power to keep the ‘black dog’ at bay. On hearing friends' family stories in all their complexity, his habitual comment ‘Oh, we bachelors’, accompanied by a wry smile and a shake of the head, disguised a deep regret that he had never had children, although in his prime he was a generous godparent.

Marylebone High Street was Levin's haunt; he lived in two elegant flats just off that thoroughfare (in Devonshire Place, then Nottingham Street) for most of his adult life, surrounded by antiques, pictures, his beloved books, and unlikely soft toys (the gifts of godchildren and friends), including a large, white, furry cat which was his substitute for the real thing. He habitually dined well, was known in London's finest restaurants (and in many further afield as well), and prided himself on his ‘professional’ knowledge of wine and of cheese. He disliked restraint applied to any of his enthusiasms, in particular rejecting with mockery anything that urged prudence in matters gastronomic. He was an old-fashioned bon viveur; it matched his predilection for the opera cloak and the white tie in an age that (to his great regret) favoured the fast and casual.

Levin began to notice memory lapses in the early 1990s. He knew his powers were failing but did not know why, and it frustrated him. From September 1995 his Times column appeared once weekly instead of twice, and in January 1997 the editor, Peter Stothard, a great admirer, took the reluctant decision that it should cease, although Levin continued to write occasional pieces for the paper. The painful truth was not that he had written himself out, as some thought, but that the onset of Alzheimer's disease made writing (and reading) more and more difficult, and ultimately impossible. Friends would watch in anguish as the master wordsmith would grasp for the simplest noun, and his own despair at the cruelty of his fate was terrible. He was cared for in his final years by his partner, Liz Anderson, to whom he dedicated his last collection of journalism. He died on 7 August 2004 at the Butterworth Centre, Hospital of St John and St Elizabeth, Westminster, and was buried in Brompton cemetery on 13 August, three days after his funeral service at Holy Trinity, Sloane Square, the delay due to the indisposition of the gravedigger. In his prime Levin would have been amused at the almost-Shakespearian black humour of this. He would certainly have enjoyed the celebration of his life on 21 October 2004 at St Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square—full of poetry, music, and his own words.

BEL MOONEY