The Pendulum Years: Britain in the Sixties

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In the bedroom he was enthusiastic, but excessively modest, always locking the bathroom door when having a bath, never letting a girl see him naked. When Lord Chief Justice Goddard died aged 94, Levin penned a strongly-worded attack on him that so infuriated the legal establishment he was blackballed from the Garrick Club. 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 experience put him off music for some time, and it was only later that it became one of his passions, a frequent topic in his writing. 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.

The next morning the debate was taken up by theatre director Sir Peter Hall and the director of the Royal Court on Radio 4's Today programme. Sometimes Levin wrote about frivolous, even farcical matters, such as a series of mock-indignant articles about the sex-lives of mosquitoes. He turned less regularly to the visual arts, but when he did his views were clear-cut and trenchantly expressed.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. Disappointed by the result of the 1959 election, which saw Harold Macmillan's Conservatives register a third election victory in succession, with a majority of more than 100, Bernard came to dislike Macmillan more and more, believing that he should, and would be thrown out. 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. 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. One of his most popular articles was about Mozart's operas, playfully categorising admirers of Così fan tutte as pessimistic, those of Don Giovanni as romantic, those of The Magic Flute as spiritual, and those of The Marriage of Figaro as humanitarian.

Apart from this column, which earned him the hatred of many MPs, he wrote separate articles commenting on the law - in particular what he saw as the folly of judges - civil servants and other public figures. In 1971, Levin appeared in an edition of Face the Music along with a new panellist, Arianna Stassinopoulos (later known as Arianna Huffington). He concludes by touching on mystery and spirituality, and the things, whether they be natural or man made, that make you catch your breath and 'provide a momentary glimpse into the infinite'. He was hired by Rees-Mogg in January 1971, by which time he was a well-known public figure who had just written an account of the 1960s entitled The Pendulum Years.Levin was a bright child and, encouraged by his mother, he worked hard enough to win a scholarship to the independent school Christ's Hospital in the countryside near Horsham, West Sussex. 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". Other chapters of food (joyous, and doesnt he like a long sentence), music, theatre, cities, archiecture, travel). 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. Henry Bernard Levin, CBE (London School of Economics, 1952) was described by the London daily The Times as "the most famous journalist of his day".

At the time, Truth had a very rightwing, even anti-semitic, reputation that Scott was anxious to get rid of. From the early 1990s, Levin developed Alzheimer's disease, which eventually forced him to give up his regular column in 1997, and to stop writing altogether not long afterwards. Against that, Alan Wood feels that Insight gave him a measure of confidence, so that he was no longer so vulnerable and no longer shuddered when strangers approached him in the street. For his friends, it was unbearably painful to watch his struggle to retrieve even the simplest word. After Levin's death The Times published an article opining that information made public since 1971 "strongly supported" his criticisms of Goddard.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography spells the name "Philip"; [1] Who Was Who, spells it "Phillip".