BERNARD LEVINFew newspaper journalists of his generationwere as well known to the British public as Bernard Levin who died on 7 August,2004, aged 75.Levin spent 30 years at The Times but healso worked on the Spectator, the Guardian, the Daily Mail and the Daily Expressduring a long, prolific and consistently controversial career.Renowned for his capacity for hard work andtaking the anti-establishment stance, Levin became a legendary Fleet Streetfigure - adored by friends and admirers and loathed by enemies with equalpassion.Levins’s passions were eclectic – politics,theatre, food, wine, music – he wrote about them all with a clarity anderudition that marked him out as the premier print journalist of the era.Harry Bernard Levin was born on 19 August,1928, in London .His mother was of Ukrainian Jewish extraction while his father, a St Pancrastailor of Lithuanian descent, fled the family shortly after Bernard’s birth.Brought up in his grandparents’ home in Camden Town ,Levin won a scholarship to Christ’s Hospital, a boarding school in West Sussex . It was a miserable time for the young Levinwho was mocked for his ancestry and his left-wing opinions.In the late 1940s Levin, on anotherscholarship, attended the London School of Economics where, politically atleast, he felt much more at home. He became a polished debater and beganwriting for the student magazine.After graduating from LSE and a short stintat the BBC, Levin joined the weekly magazine, Truth,a low budget publication which had many talentedcontributors such as Phillip Larkin and Katherine Whitehorn.After a spell as the television critic atthe Manchester Guardian, Levin joined the Spectator in 1956 as a politicalcommentator. Levin’s “Taper” columnbecame a huge success.He left the Spectator in 1962 and joinedthe Daily Mail as a drama critic, a position he enjoyed for 10 years. In 1963he began to appear on the satirical television programme That Was the Week That Wasas an antagonistic interviewer ofcelebrities.By now a household name, Levin could haveworked on any paper when he resigned from the Mail in 1971. Typically he chose TheTimes, preferring to write on a paper where his left-wing opinions were out ofkilter with the generally conservative outlook of the broadsheet.He remained on The Times, championingliberty and justice, for the rest of his career until Alzheimer’s disease beganto gradually erode his former brilliance. It was a desperately sad decline forsuch a proudly erudite and educated journalist.Levin remained a bachelor but was rarelywithout a girlfriend. Most notable among these was Arianna Stassinopolous, afellow journalist who he partnered for many years in the 1970s. His devotedfriend, Elizabeth Anderson, comforted him through his final years.Levin was a newspaper man whose best workwas produced in column form but he did write a handful of interesting books,most notably about his own travels such as 1985’s In Hannibal’s Footstepswhich recounted a journey across France andSpain.Levin was a larger than life character – alover of life, good food, music and the company of friends to whom he wasunstintingly loyal and generous. He was touched to be awarded the CBE in 1990.There are no shortages of quotes that couldbe used to sum up one of Britain ’smost famous journalists. Perhaps the most apposite comes from Levin’s closefriend, Lord Rees-Mogg, who said: “He was as brilliant a columnist as we havehad in Britain since the last war.”
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