The Pendulum Years: Britain in the Sixties

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The family lived in Camden Town and Bernard was brought up, though not strictly, in the Jewish faith. Such religious sympathies as he had, he said, were "with quietist faiths, like Buddhism, on the one hand, and with a straightforward message of salvation, like Christianity, on the other".

He followed this with The End Of The Rhine (1987), another excellent account of a walk down the length of the river. In its obituary tribute to him, The Times described Levin as "the most famous journalist of his day".His impersonation of the LSE's much revered professor of political science, Harold Laski, arguing with himself, knocking down his own propositions one by one, revealing the fallacies in each, was evidently a tour de force. Henry Bernard Levin CBE (19 August 1928 – 7 August 2004) was an English journalist, author and broadcaster, described by The Times as "the most famous journalist of his day". He was a bright child and 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. n 4] Mooney describes his television reviews as "notably punchy" [1] and The Times commented, "Levin took out his shotgun and let loose with both barrels".

At concerts by the school orchestra (whose members included Levin's contemporary, Colin Davis), Levin listened seriously to music for the first time. Levin became a broadcaster, first on the weekly satirical television show That Was the Week That Was in the early 1960s, then as a panellist on a musical quiz, Face the Music, and finally in three series of travel programmes in the 1980s.He looked about 16, phenomenally clean with scrubbed nails and a coil of dark hair like a bedspring lunging from his forehead .

Being driven by a woman to Glyndebourne, he became convinced that other drivers were sneering at him. Levin became a skilled debater; he wrote for the student newspaper The Beaver, on a range of subjects, not least opera, which became one of his lifelong passions. By now, Levin's political views were moving to the right, and he was no longer writing so much against the grain of his newspaper.He compiled his own index for the book, "and swore a mighty oath, when I had finished the task, that I would rather die, and in a particularly unpleasant manner, than do it again". Levin resigned, and immediately received offers from The Guardian and The Times to join them as a columnist. Levin was the subject of gossip column speculation in the early Seventies when he began a five-year relationship with author Arianna Stassinopoulous, a former president of the Cambridge Union and now, as Arianna Huffington, a US Republican politician. Some viewers were delighted one evening, when a man strode on to the set and punched Bernard, knocking him off his stool.