The Pendulum Years: Britain in the Sixties

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He remained true to his declared intention of eschewing all forms of vehicular transport, and walked all the way, with the exception of his crossing the Rhone, rowing himself in a small boat. He had an exceptionally wide circle of friends who, for some reason, he kept in separate compartments, a characteristic common perhaps to bachelors. In this series he encountered extremes of wealth and poverty, and met a wide variety of people, some famous (such as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Donald Trump) and some not (including a sword-swallowing unicyclist, and a bag lady in Central Park).

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. His job was to read all the newspapers and weekly magazines, selecting articles that might be useful for broadcasting.He joined The Times as a columnist in 1970, almost immediately provoking controversy and lawsuits, and left when the paper was taken over by Rupert Murdoch.

Briefly, after graduation in 1952, he worked as a guide on coach tours, doubtless providing the passengers with more diverse and arcane information than they had any right to expect. In 1953, he came across an advertisement in Truth, a weekly edited by the liberal journalist George Scott, appealing for editorial staff. The journalist and author Bernard Levin has died at the age of 75 after a 50-year career most celebrated for his columns in the Times. 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. The piece contains a further 55 phrases from Shakespeare familiar in regular conversation, [49] as well as one – "but me no buts" – misattributed to Shakespeare by Levin, but in fact from Susanna Centlivre's The Busie Body (1709), later used in Fielding's Rape upon Rape (1730) and popularised by Scott's The Antiquary (1816).The book is dedicated "To Arianna, with much more than enthusiasm" – they remained loving friends for the rest of his life. This mirrored his opening gambit when publication of The Times resumed in 1979 after a printers' strike lasting nearly a year: his first column then had begun with the word "Moreover". The proprietor and editor of the long-established weekly The Spectator, Ian Gilmour, invited Levin to join his staff. 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. When this did not happen, he decided to move on, at first going to the Daily Express as theatre critic, and from 1962 to 1965 working at the Daily Mail in the same capacity.

Although he never married, he had a number of relationships, including a noted liaison in the 1970s with the author and heiress, Arianna Stassinopoulous, who as Arianna Huffington is now a US Republican politician. In the Daily Express he even featured in a series, The Hate Makers, penned by a then prominent rightwing journalist, Robert Pitman.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. In 1980 he wrote extensive accounts in his column about his visit to the Indian commune of the meditation teacher Osho. From September 1995, his Times column appeared once weekly instead of twice, and in January 1997 the editor, Peter Stothard, concluded, despite a great admiration for Levin, that the weekly column should cease. Levin was a frequent panel member along with, among others, Robin Ray, Joyce Grenfell, David Attenborough and Richard Baker. Levin's style was noted for its long sentences with copious sub-clauses and regular use of semi-colons - he once managed a 1,500-word sentence.

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. He appeared in The Guinness Book of Records for the longest sentence ever to appear in a newspaper – 1,667 words.

The first, Hannibal's Footsteps, screened in 1985, showed Levin walking the presumed route taken by Hannibal when he invaded Italy in 218 BC. Levin began to have difficulty with his balance as early as 1988, although Alzheimer's disease was not diagnosed until the early 1990s. In his heyday, he was one of the most listened to voices in the British media, with a profile that straddled print journalism, writing books and broadcasting work on radio and TV.