The Pendulum Years: Britain in the Sixties

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In 1981 Levin took a sabbatical from The Times after Rupert Murdoch bought the paper and Harold Evans succeeded Rees-Mogg as editor. Sometimes Levin wrote about frivolous, even farcical matters, such as a series of mock-indignant articles about the sex-lives of mosquitoes. 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 gives the latter a blunt Anglo-Saxon vocabulary with regard to the sexual act and the relevant body parts for which Penguin Books, as publisher, was prosecuted unsuccessfully for obscenity. 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.

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. 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". 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. 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. 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 1971, Levin appeared in an edition of Face the Music along with a new panellist, Arianna Stassinopoulos (later known as Arianna Huffington). In 1959, Gilmour, while remaining as proprietor, stepped down as editor and was succeeded by his deputy, Brian Inglis; Levin took over from Inglis as assistant editor. Henry Bernard Levin, journalist, born August 19, 1928; died August 7, 2004 Quentin Crewe died in 1998, and the above obituary has been revised.

Levin began to have difficulty with his balance as early as 1988, although Alzheimer's disease was not diagnosed until the early 1990s.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). Levin was happy to make fun of his obsession with Wagner; in a 1989 piece not concerned with music but about racism he began, "Will everybody please keep calm; this is not going to be about Wagner, however ominous the evidence. Levin became famous for his long, sentences, full of clauses, subclauses, parentheses, semi-colons and diversions. 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.

Evans and Levin were friends, [55] but Levin had publicly stated his preference that Charles Douglas-Home should be appointed.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. At the Daily Mail in the 1960s, he wrote five 600-word columns a week on top of his theatre reviews. The son of a poor Jewish family in London, he won a scholarship to the independent school Christ's Hospital and went on to the London School of Economics, graduating in 1952.