Henry Bernard Levin (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". 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,|group=n a tailor of Jewish Bessarabian descent, and his wife, Rose, née Racklin. Philip Levin abandoned the family when Levin was a child, 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 (noodles), kreplach or kneidlach. As an adult Levin retained his love of Jewish cookery along with his passion for French haute cuisine.
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. His housemaster was D. S. ("Boom") 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. In the local streets, the school's conspicuous uniform, including a blue coat, knee breeches and yellow socks, attracted unwanted attention. 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.
thumb|right|Levin's LSE tutors, [[Karl Popper (l.) 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". 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. Levin's noticeably Jewish surname, together with such skills as he had acquired in shorthand and typing, gained him immediate acceptance. 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. Brian Inglis, assistant editor of The Spectator at the time of Levin's appointment, later said that the by-line "Taper" had been chosen for the column in case Levin turned out to be unsatisfactory and had to be replaced.