The Pendulum Years: Britain in the Sixties

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He followed this with The End Of The Rhine (1987), another excellent account of a walk down the length of the river. n 2] In The Guardian after Levin's death, Quentin Crewe wrote, "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.

Another scholarship, in the late 1940s, took Bernard to the London School of Economics where he was much more at home in the pervading leftwing atmosphere. 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".For his friends, it was unbearably painful to watch his struggle to retrieve even the simplest word. Gilmour discouraged any hopes Levin might have had of succeeding Inglis as editor and in 1962, Levin left both The Spectator and The Daily Express, becoming drama critic of The Daily Mail.

In 1954, the Spectator's then owner, Ian Gilmour, appointed Brian Inglis as the editor of the weekly. The Guardian took him on in September 1955 to review the first broadcasts of ITV, which had just been launched as Britain's first commercial TV station.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 informative and entertaining account of his walk and the places he passed through. For over a quarter of a century he wrote two, sometimes three columns a week for The Times on subjects as diverse as smoking bans, Britain's electoral system, the decline of West End theatre and the government of Singapore. And the reason is that it offers, in addition to great technical skill and great cinematic excitement, a view, and a view, moreover, of great richness and plausibility. Now things have gone to the opposite extreme, with sketch-writing derivative from Levin's all the rage and hardly any straight reporting of Parliament. He turned less regularly to the visual arts, but when he did his views were clear-cut and trenchantly expressed.

In its obituary tribute to him, The Times described Levin as "the most famous journalist of his day".Although by the early 1960s, Levin was becoming a well-known name, his was not yet a well-known face.

He battled on many fronts at Christ's Hospital: he was a Jew at a Church of England establishment; he was from a poor family (although Christ's Hospital is a charity school); he was slight of stature; he was utterly indifferent to sport; he adopted a Marxist stance, hanging the Red Flag from a school window to celebrate the Labour victory in 1945. The book is an easy read - it came to my attention through a walking magazine, as one section is dedicated to rambling - city or county - particularly a walk he completes in London criss crossing the bridges.His range was prodigious; he published nine volumes of his selected journalism of which the first, Taking Sides, covered subjects as diverse as the death watch beetle, Field Marshal Montgomery, Wagner, homophobia, censorship, Eldridge Cleaver, arachnophobia, theatrical nudity, and the North Thames Gas Board. I didn't think I would after reading the first chapter and disagreeing with many of his more pessimistic statements on modern life, but from then on it was an absolute joy. Levin hoped to go to the University of Cambridge, but, as his obituarist in The Times wrote, he "was not considered Oxbridge material". Here he patented modern parliamentary sketch-writing as a form of comic theatre at a time when TV and newspapers were far more deferential to politicians than they are today.