Bernard Levin: Bernard Levin, who has died aged 75, after many years of Alzheimer's, was one of the most famous and controversial British journalists and broadcasters of the second half of the last century.
His ever-restless pen provoked emotions that varied from rage, even hatred, to affection and admiration. Employed during the last 30 years primarily on the Times and the Sunday Times, his career had also taken him to the Observer, the Manchester Guardian, the Spectator, the New Statesman, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express.
Levin's mother was the daughter of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants. His father, of Lithuanian extraction, a St Pancras tailor, left her shortly after Bernard's birth in London. The family lived in Camden Town, and Levin was brought up, though not strictly, in the Jewish faith. His illiterate grandparents' stories about life in Russia must have instilled in him the passionate belief in the freedom of the individual that lasted his whole life. In return, as he grew older, he used to read to them in Yiddish.
He won a London County Council scholarship to Christ's Hospital, the charity boarding school in Horsham, West Sussex, where he was to experience, for the first time, being mocked in the street and to encounter strong attacks on his opinions. At school he announced that he was a communist and set up on his desk a small collection of books from what was known as the Little Lenin Library. His fellow pupils, mostly from a very different background, renamed them the Little Levin Library, eventually throwing them out of the window.
Another scholarship, in the late 1940s, took him to the London School of Economics where he was much more at home in the pervading left-wing atmosphere. He was soon active in the student union and politics generally. He also found he could give rein to his penchant for causing mischief and for teasing authority. His impersonation of the LSE's revered professor of political science, Harold Laski, arguing with himself, knocking down his own propositions one by one, was a tour de force.
Briefly, after graduation in 1952, he worked as a guide on coach tours, but soon got a job with the BBC North American Service reading all the newspapers and weekly journals, cutting out pieces that might be useful to quote on the air.
In 1953 he came across an advertisement in Truth, a weekly edited by the liberal journalist George Scott, appealing for editorial staff. At the time, Truth had a very right-wing, even anti-Semitic, reputation that Scott was anxious to get rid of. Bernard arrived at their offices and when the secretary told Scott the name of the applicant he was delighted by the Jewish name and said: "Show him in, he's got a job."
Levin's first piece for Truth dealt with his disillusionment with the Labour Party, and he soon got noticed. In 1954 the Spectator's owner, Ian Gilmour, appointed Brian Inglis the editor of the weekly. Inglis invited Levin to be his deputy; together they gradually built up a distinguished band of contributors.
In 1957 he started to write the parliamentary column, Taper, which was to set the seal on his fame. He invented comical names for politicians, famously renaming a Conservative attorney general, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, Sir Reginald Bullying Manner.
Apart from the column, which earned him the hatred of many MPs, he wrote articles commenting on the law (in particular what he saw as the folly of judges), civil servants and other public figures. These were frequently rash, and his ferocious attack on Lord Goddard, the vindictive lord chief justice, a few days after his death in 1958 affronted many people's sense of good taste.
Many confirm Levin's extraordinary ability to do two or even three things at once; holding forth on Sir Oswald Mosley while typing his column, then switching without pause to an appreciation of the opera he had seen the night before.
At the same time, his concentration on himself was on occasion perilous. He told a colleague one day that at dinner in a restaurant the night before, he had been so engrossed in the story he was telling that he did not notice that a man at the opposite table had had a stroke and died until ambulance men came to gather him up.
And his capacity for mischief had not abated. Alan Brien recalled him going into Karl Miller's office and switching the jackets of the books being sent out for review so that Field Marshal Lord Montgomery was puzzled to receive, not a book on military strategy, but on the Chinese circus.
Considering its impact, it is a surprise to realise that the Taper column ran for only two years. Disappointed by the result of the 1959 election, which saw Harold Macmillan's Conservatives register a third election victory in succession, Levin came to dislike Macmillan more and more, believing that he should, and would, be thrown out.
When this did not happen, he decided to move on, at first going to the Daily Express as theatre critic, and from 1962 to 1965 working at the Daily Mail in the same capacity. He then became a Mail feature writer and in 1969 What The Papers Say columnist of the year. His contract specified that he should have complete freedom and that no one should change anything he wrote, either for opinion or style, without his consent.
In 1963 he moved into television to become a household name. He became an important figure on BBCs late-Saturday-night satire show, That Was The Week That Was, and later on its less renowned successor, Not So Much A Programme More A Way Of Life.
His role on TW3 each week was to interview someone in the news. He did so in a way that was, then, a trifle shocking, one of the first TV interviewers to deploy rudeness as a technique. The result was public loathing, and going into the theatre people even spat at him.
Some viewers were delighted one evening when a man strode on to the set and punched Levin, knocking him off his stool. It was Desmond Leslie, an expert on unidentified flying objects. Levin had given a bad review to Leslie's wife, Agnes Bernelle.
Back at the Daily Mail, in the week of the 1970 general election, Levin wrote columns of impartial comments on the merits of both sides. For the polling day he promised definite advice and urged readers to "Vote Labour". The editor demanded he change it. He refused, reminding him of his contract.
He was summoned by Vere Harmsworth, then the proprietor's son. Again Levin refused to change a word. He was threatened with dismissal, but decided to resign and, spurning a job offer from the Guardian on the grounds that he was too much in agreement with its views, went to the Times, then edited by William Rees-Mogg.
For a man of such erudition who took so passionate an interest in literature and had so consuming a feeling for music, he had surprisingly little visual taste, most noticeable in his clothes. He loved dressing up in the evening, always wearing to the opera a swirling cloak lined with bright-coloured silk and imposed this taste on the women he took with him.
So fussy was he that he once suggested that Katharine Whitehorn go home to change because one of her stockings had a ladder.
Equally strange were his insecurities. He never learned to drive, and this could upset him. Being driven by a woman to Glyndebourne, he became convinced that other drivers were sneering at him. He asked her to stop, went into a chemist and bought a sling. He put it on, reasoning that people would now understand why he was not at the wheel.
He had an exceptionally wide circle of friends who, for some reason, he kept in separate compartments, a characteristic common perhaps to bachelors. He never lost or fell out with a friend. His generosity was exceptional. His romantic nature meant that he was usually in love, but wary of commitment. He had a succession of women friends whom he spoilt with lavish presents.
Towards the end of the 1970s he entered on a strange phase. He fell more in love than ever before with Arianna Stassinopoulos (now Arianna Huffington, a political commentator in California). He wanted to marry her, and she agreed, but made conditions. Somehow, it never materialised.
Through her he became involved in an organisation called Insight. Part of its ritual was to encourage each other to act out their fantasies. There were stories of Levin dressing up in a tutu that boggled the minds of his friends.
This embracing of odd ideas led him on to writing articles in praise of the spurious guru Bagwan Rajneesh. It was part of a recurring pattern which led him to support figures he should have detested, such as Richard Nixon and his vice-president, Spiro Agnew. There are those who believe that the edge of his writing was blunted thereafter.
In some senses he had mellowed. He enjoyed the best relations with successive editors of the Times. They liked and admired him for several qualities, loyalty being the most outstanding. His capacity for work was legendary. If he was going away for a few weeks, he would write 12 articles to be used in his absence. Gradually he came to write fewer vituperative articles and more ruminative ones on music (especially Wagner), literature and the arts, never forsaking his pet hates - lawyers, especially judges, and home secretaries.
His books included collections of his columns for the Times. But there were others, too: The Pendulum Years (1971), a history of the 1960s; Conducted Tour (1981), a survey of the music festivals of Europe; and in 1985 he undertook a walk across Spain and France which led to In Hannibal's Footsteps, an entertaining account of his walk.
He became a CBE in 1990.
A decade ago, Levin mentioned to friends that he was suffering from some unidentifiable illness. Indeed, it was plain to see. Five years passed before he revealed that he had Alzheimer's, a cruel torment for a man who prided himself on his memory. For friends, it was unbearably painful to watch his struggle to retrieve even the simplest word. He was lovingly supported and encouraged by his devoted friend, Elizabeth Anderson. He is survived by his sister who lives with her family in America.
Henry Bernard Levin: born August 19th, 1928; died August 7th, 2004