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. These decrees constitute a pair of campaign medals that I wear with considerable pleasure and I have a profound suspicion of those who rebuke me for partisanship while wearing only one". In other words, mosquitoes don't mind varying the straight and narrow with a bit on the side when they can get it: not, you will agree, an attitude entirely confined to mosquitoes". Thus did he invite some 80 members of his circle to an evening at the Cafe Royale, at which he encouraged us to enrol.

He told Brien one morning that at dinner in a restaurant the night before, he had been so engrossed in the story he was telling that he did not notice that a man at the opposite table had had a stroke and died until ambulance men came to gather him up. In the end, he chose The Times, giving as his reason that though the liberal Guardian was more in line with his own politics than the conservative Times, "I wrote more comfortably against the grain of the paper I worked for rather than with it". 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". In its obituary tribute to him, The Times described Levin as "the most famous journalist of his day". Levin was twice assaulted on air, once by the husband of an actress whose show Levin had reviewed severely, [31] [n 8] and once by a woman astrologer who squirted him with water.

Born in London into a Jewish family of Lithuanian extraction in 1928, Levin was educated at Christ's Hospital and the London School of Economics, where he later became an honorary fellow.

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. By now, Levin's political views were moving to the right, and he was no longer writing so much against the grain of his newspaper. In 1956, Levin found himself in irreconcilable disagreement with Truth's support of the Anglo-French military action in the Suez Crisis. Difficulties could arise through his sensitivity about his work and his great reluctance to talk about any problems that he had in his writing, even though he was worried that he was stuck in a series of ruts and was specialising in about five subjects. 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.Once, in the office, he was boasting that he could pick up the journalist Jackie Gillott and whirl her round his head. Levin hoped to go to the University of Cambridge, but, as his obituarist in The Times wrote, he "was not considered Oxbridge material". 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'. Now things have gone to the opposite extreme, with sketch-writing derivative from Levin's all the rage and hardly any straight reporting of Parliament. 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, [n 7] and denunciation of the retired Lord Chief Justice, Lord Goddard.

In the local streets, the school's conspicuous uniform, including a blue coat, knee breeches and yellow socks, attracted unwanted attention. But the media organisation with which he became most closely identified was the Times, particularly under the editorship of William Rees-Mogg in the 1970s. During a long newspaper strike, when Truth, as one of the few publications available, enjoyed a surge in circulation, the quality of his contributions stood out. As political correspondent of The Spectator under the pseudonym "Taper", he became "the father of the modern parliamentary sketch," as The Guardian's Simon Hoggart put it.Evans and Levin were friends, [55] but Levin had publicly stated his preference that Charles Douglas-Home should be appointed. The first was in March 1971, in an article titled "Profit and dishonour in Fleet Street", accusing Rothermere of underhand conduct and personal avarice during the merger of The Daily Mail and The Daily Sketch.

He loved dressing up in the evening, always wearing to the opera a swirling cloak lined with bright-coloured silk. 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. 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. I didn't think I would after reading the first chapter and disagreeing with many of his more pessimistic statements on modern life, but from then on it was an absolute joy.

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. He wrote several articles on the subject, and when reviewing books made a point of praising good indexes and condemning bad ones.