The Pendulum Years: Britain in the Sixties

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Levin, Bernard, "A noble dream, but I won't see it and nor will you", The Times, 22 October 1982, p. It was a strange experience to hear this paragon of logic, sceptical of all humbug trotting out stories that normally he would have scoffed at. His knowledge and love of literature were reflected in many of his writings; among his best-known pieces is a long paragraph about the influence of Shakespeare on everyday discourse. Levin occupied a desk in the editor's outer office and the pair were in constant touch throughout the day.

His impersonation of the LSE's much revered professor of political science, Harold Laski, arguing with himself, knocking down his own propositions one by one, revealing the fallacies in each, was evidently a tour de force.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.

Often the males made a series of rapid thrusts with their terminalia in the direction of the female's terminalium without actually clasping any structures of the female. His fellow pupils, mostly from a very different kind of background, renamed them the Little Levin Library - eventually throwing them out of the window. 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. Levin was born on 19 August 1928 in London, [1] the second child and only son of Philip Levin, [n 1] a tailor of Jewish Bessarabian descent, and his wife, Rose, née Racklin. 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.In June 1970, during the general election campaign, Levin fell out with the proprietors of The Daily Mail, Lord Rothermere and his son Vere Harmsworth. Against that, Alan Wood feels that Insight gave him a measure of confidence, so that he was no longer so vulnerable and no longer shuddered when strangers approached him in the street. He appeared in The Guinness Book of Records for the longest sentence ever to appear in a newspaper – 1,667 words. A decade ago, Bernard mentioned to his friends that he was suffering from some unidentifiable illness.

n 13] He wrote about performers he admired, including Otto Klemperer, Alfred Brendel, and Kiri Te Kanawa. Levin became famous for his long, sentences, full of clauses, subclauses, parentheses, semi-colons and diversions. In 1956, Levin found himself in irreconcilable disagreement with Truth's support of the Anglo-French military action in the Suez Crisis. Among the perquisites of the Times appointment were a company car and a large and splendid office at the paper's building in Printing House Square, London. 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.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. Over 26 years - interrupted by a self-imposed break when Harold Evans became editor in 1981 - he contributed over 2,000 Times opinion pieces that often set the tone of national debate. He was hired by Rees-Mogg in January 1971, by which time he was a well-known public figure who had just written an account of the 1960s entitled The Pendulum Years. He fell more in love than ever before with Arianna Stassinopoulos (now Arianna Huffington, and a political commentator in California).