The Pendulum Years: Britain in the Sixties

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He gave a fellow-critic an edition of Shaw's collected criticism, writing inside the cover, "'In the hope that when you come across the phrases I have already stolen you will keep quiet about it". 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. Henry Bernard Levin CBE (19 August 1928 – 7 August 2004) was an English journalist, author and broadcaster, described by The Times as "the most famous journalist of his day". 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. He went on to work as the drama critic for The Daily Express and later The Daily Mail, and appeared regularly on the satirical BBC programme, That Was The Week That Was.

Being driven by a woman to Glyndebourne, he became convinced that other drivers were sneering at him.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. 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.

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. He came to fame with David Frost and Millicent Martin as a satirical commentator on the influential BBC television programme That Was The Week That Was. A decade ago, Bernard mentioned to his friends that he was suffering from some unidentifiable illness.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). The Society of Indexers has instituted an award in Levin's name; it is given to "a journalist and author whose writings show untiring and eloquent support for indexers and indexing". The libel action brought by Rothermere was settled out of court, at substantial cost to the proprietor of The Times, Lord Thomson. It was part of a recurring pattern which led him to support figures he should have detested such as Richard Nixon and his vice-president Spiro Agnew.