The Pendulum Years: Britain in the Sixties

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Employed during the last three decades primarily on the Times and the Sunday Times, his career had also taken him to such publications as the Observer, the Manchester Guardian, the Spectator, the New Statesman, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express. Levin's regular pieces in The Times and later the Spectator commenting on everything, from the latest Royal Opera House production of Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutti to milk jiggers in motorway service stations, made him the literary equivalent of Boxer.

He looked about 16, phenomenally clean with scrubbed nails and a coil of dark hair like a bedspring lunging from his forehead .He maintained that he could construct impromptu a sentence of up to 40 subordinate clauses "and many a native of these islands, speaking English as to the manner born, has followed me trustingly into the labyrinth only to perish miserably trying to find the way out". Levin was twice assaulted on air, once by the husband of an actress whose show Levin had reviewed severely, [31] [n 8] and once by a woman astrologer who squirted him with water.

Inglis invited Bernard to be his deputy, together gradually building up a distinguished band of contributors, including Karl Miller as literary editor, Brien as theatre critic and arts editor, and Cyril Ray, the wine expert. When we went to the opera together and there was no possibility of my getting up the stairs, he would insist on carrying me in the way that more brawny friends would do. After a vitriolic review of a play starring the actress and singer, Agnes Bernelle, her husband Desmond Leslie came to the studio and hit Levin in front of 11 million viewers. 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 appeared in The Guinness Book of Records for the longest sentence ever to appear in a newspaper – 1,667 words.

Among the perquisites of the Times appointment were a company car and a large and splendid office at the paper's building in Printing House Square, London. He wrote on a wide range of subjects, from a campaign for the release of three Arabs imprisoned by the British authorities, to supporting publication of the banned novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, [n 7] and denunciation of the retired Lord Chief Justice, Lord Goddard. Levin, Bernard, "A noble dream, but I won't see it and nor will you", The Times, 22 October 1982, p. Among his topics were prominent people including Harold Macmillan and Harold Wilson – dubbed the Walrus and the Carpenter by Levin – and institutions such as the monarchy, the churches and the British Empire in its last days.

After a short spell in a lowly job at the BBC selecting press cuttings for use in programmes, he secured a post as a junior member of the editorial staff of a weekly periodical, Truth, in 1953. He invented comical names for politicians - thus did the then Conservative attorney general Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller became Sir Reginald Bullying Manner. The Levin household was not especially musical, though it had a piano which Judith was taught to play; Rose Levin bought her son a violin and paid for lessons, convinced that he was "destined to be the next Kreisler or Heifetz".He was proud of this, and affected to be outraged when "some bugger in India wrote a sentence very considerably longer". Bernard Levin takes us on an entertaining voyage of what enthuses him, taking us from books, music, Shakespeare to walking, cities and the meaning of life. The first, Hannibal's Footsteps, screened in 1985, showed Levin walking the presumed route taken by Hannibal when he invaded Italy in 218 BC. The programme followed Levin's 320-mile journey from Aigues-Mortes to the crossing into Italy in the Queyras valley in the French Alps. Lawrence's 1928 novel, published in other countries but never, until 1960, in Britain, tells of a love affair between the wife of an English landowner and his gamekeeper.

Levin became famous for his long, sentences, full of clauses, subclauses, parentheses, semi-colons and diversions. At the age of 30, she remained deeply in love with him but longed to have children; Levin never wanted to marry or be a father. He wrote of a Pre-Raphaelite exhibition in 1984, "Never, in all my life, not even at the exclusively Millais exhibition in 1967, have I seen so much sickening rubbish in one place at one time". The paper had recently been taken over by the liberal publisher Ronald Staples who together with his new editor Vincent Evans was determined to cleanse it of its previous right-wing racist reputation.

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".