Bernard Levin
Henry Bernard Levin was an English journalist, author and broadcaster, described by The Times as "the most famous journalist of his day". 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. After a short spell in a lowly job at the BBC selecting press cuttings for use in programmes, he secured a post as a junior member of the editorial staff of a weekly periodical, Truth, in 1953.
Levin reviewed television for the Manchester Guardian and wrote a weekly political column in The Spectator noted for its irreverence and influence on modern parliamentary sketches. During the 1960s he wrote five columns a week for the Daily Mail on any subject that he chose. After a disagreement with the proprietor of the paper over attempted censorship of his column in 1970, Levin moved to The Times where, with one break of just over a year in 1981–82, he remained as resident columnist until his retirement, covering a wide range of topics, both serious and comic.
Levin became a broadcaster, first on the weekly satirical television show That Was the Week That Was in the early 1960s, then as a panellist on a musical quiz, Face the Music, and finally in three series of travel programmes in the 1980s. He began to write books in the 1970s, publishing 17 between 1970 and 1998. 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.
Life and career
Early years
Levin was born on 19 August 1928 in London, the second child and only son of Philip Levin, a tailor of Jewish Bessarabian descent, and his wife, Rose, née Racklin. Philip Levin abandoned the family when Levin was a child, and the two children were brought up with the help of their maternal grandparents, who had emigrated from Lithuania at the turn of the 20th century. Levin wrote of his childhood, "My home was not a religious one; my grandfather read the scriptures to himself silently and struggled through a little English; my grandmother, who could read no language at all, lit a candle on the appropriate days, as did my mother, though for her it was not really a religious sign. My uncles were quite secular... and had hardly anything to do with the religion of their father and grandfathers". 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. In return, as he grew older, he used to read to them. Bernard could not read Hebrew, but he could get by in Yiddish".Rose Levin was a capable cook, and, though the household was not well off, Levin was well fed and acquired an interest in food that in adult life became one of the regular themes of his journalism. The cuisine was traditional Jewish, with fried fish as one cornerstone of the repertoire, and chicken as another – boiled, roast, or in soup with lokshen, kreplach or kneidlach. As an adult Levin retained his love of Jewish cookery along with his passion for French haute cuisine.
File:Quad DH.jpg|thumb|upright=1.25|left|Christ's Hospital school in West Sussex
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". Levin persevered ineptly for two and a half years and then gave up with relief. 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 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. His housemaster was D. S. Macnutt, the school's head of Classics. Macnutt was a strict, even bullying, teacher, and was feared rather than loved by his pupils, but Levin learned Classics well, and acquired a lifelong fondness for placing Latin tags and quotations in his writing. 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 ; 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. In the local streets, the school's conspicuous uniform, including a blue coat, knee breeches and yellow socks, attracted unwanted attention. Levin's biographer Bel Mooney writes of this period, "Jeers put iron in his soul". Among the consolations of Christ's Hospital was its thriving musical life. At concerts by the school orchestra, Levin listened seriously to music for the first time. The food at the school was no such consolation; according to Levin it was so appalling that there must be something better to be found, and from his late teens he sought out the best restaurants he could afford.
File:Popper-laski.jpg|thumb|right|Levin's LSE tutors, Karl Popper and Harold Laski
Levin hoped to go to the University of Cambridge, but, as his obituarist in The Times wrote, he "was not considered Oxbridge material". He was accepted by the London School of Economics, where he studied from 1948 to 1952. His talents were recognised and encouraged by LSE tutors including Karl Popper and Harold Laski; Levin's deep affection for both did not prevent his perfecting a comic impersonation of the latter. Levin became a skilled debater; he wrote for the student newspaper The Beaver, on a range of subjects, not least opera, which became one of his lifelong passions.
Having graduated from the LSE in 1952, Levin worked briefly as a tour guide, and then joined the BBC's North American Service. His job was to read all the newspapers and weekly magazines, selecting articles that might be useful for broadcasting.
Journalism
In 1953, Levin applied for a job on the weekly periodical Truth. The paper had recently been taken over by the liberal publisher Ronald Staples who together with his new editor Vincent Evans was determined to cleanse it of its previous right-wing racist reputation. Levin's noticeably Jewish surname, together with such skills as he had acquired in shorthand and typing, gained him immediate acceptance. He was offered the post of "general editorial dogsbody, which was exactly what I had been looking for". After a year, Evans left and was succeeded by his deputy, George Scott; Levin was promoted in Scott's place. He wrote for the paper under a variety of pseudonyms, including "A. E. Cherryman".While still at Truth, Levin was invited to write a column in The Manchester Guardian about ITV, Britain's first commercial television channel, launched in 1955. Mooney describes his television reviews as "notably punchy" and The Times commented, "Levin took out his shotgun and let loose with both barrels". Levin gave the opening programmes a kindly review, but by the fourth day of commercial television he was beginning to baulk: "There has been nothing to get our teeth into apart from three different brands of cake-mix and a patent doughnut". Thereafter, he did not spare the network: "cliché succeeded to cliché"; "a mentally defective aborigine who was deaf in both ears would have little difficulty in leaving Double Your Money £32 richer than when he entered"; and after the network's first hundred days he attributed its viewing figures to the "number of people who are sufficiently stupid to derive pleasure from such programmes".
''The Spectator''
In 1956, Levin found himself in irreconcilable disagreement with Truth's support of the Anglo-French military action in the Suez Crisis. The proprietor and editor of the long-established weekly The Spectator, Ian Gilmour, invited Levin to join his staff. Levin left Truth and became the political correspondent of The Spectator. He declared that he was no expert in politics, but Gilmour advised him, "review it as you would review television". Levin wrote his column under the pseudonym "Taper", from the name of a corrupt political insider in Disraeli's 1844 novel Coningsby. He followed Gilmour's advice, becoming, as The GuardianLevin made no pretence of even-handedness. There were politicians he liked and politicians he did not like. For those in the latter category, "Taper's lacerations wounded". He invented unflattering nicknames; he wrote later, "I did not think of calling Sir Hartley Shawcross Sir Shortly Floorcross, but I did call Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller Sir Reginald Bullying-Manner". When the latter was elevated to the peerage as Lord Dilhorne, Levin renamed him Lord Stillborn.
Taper was not Levin's only work for The Spectator. He wrote on a wide range of subjects, from a campaign for the release of three Arabs imprisoned by the British authorities, to supporting publication of the banned novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, and denunciation of the former Lord Chief Justice, Lord Goddard. The last led to a secret meeting of more than 20 senior judges to see whether Levin could be prosecuted for criminal libel; there was no prosecution, and according to The Times his accusations about Goddard's vindictiveness, deceit and bias were accepted orthodoxy. 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. Later in that year, after the general election victory of another of his bêtes noires, Harold Macmillan, Levin gave up the Taper column, professing himself to be in despair.
Concurrently with his work at The Spectator, Levin was the drama critic of The Daily Express from 1959, offending many in theatrical circles by his outspoken verdicts. He modelled his reviewing style on that of Bernard Shaw's musical reviews of the late 19th century. 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".
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. He remained there for eight years, and for the last five of them also wrote five columns a week on any subject of his choice.