The Pendulum Years: Britain in the Sixties

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The first, Hannibal's Footsteps, screened in 1985, showed Levin walking the presumed route taken by Hannibal when he invaded Italy in 218 BC. A decade ago, Bernard mentioned to his friends that he was suffering from some unidentifiable illness. 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.

He came to fame with David Frost and Millicent Martin as a satirical commentator on the influential BBC television programme That Was The Week That Was. 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 became an important figure on BBCs late Saturday-night satire show, That Was The Week That Was, and later on its less renowned successor, Not So Much A Programme More A Way Of Life. His father, of Lithuanian extraction, a St Pancras tailor, left her shortly after Bernard's birth in London. Bernard Levin takes us on an entertaining voyage of what enthuses him, taking us from books, music, Shakespeare to walking, cities and the meaning of life.

Some viewers were delighted one evening, when a man strode on to the set and punched Bernard, knocking him off his stool. 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.

He joined The Times as a columnist in 1970, almost immediately provoking controversy and lawsuits, and left when the paper was taken over by Rupert Murdoch. In one of his last regular columns Levin bemoaned the fall in audiences for London plays other than musicals and the great classics. 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.

We digitise over 8,000 portraits a year and we cannot guarantee being able to digitise images that are not already scheduled. 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. 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. It contains a sentence that far outdoes his earlier 1,667 word effort in The Times, starting on page 212 and ending four pages later; it lists the restaurants most esteemed by Levin in Europe, Asia and America.