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The Pendulum Years: Britain in the Sixties

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Once, in the office, he was boasting that he could pick up the journalist Jackie Gillott and whirl her round his head. 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 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.

Among the individual events examined in the book were the 1968 student riots and the prosecution for obscenity of the publishers of Lady Chatterley's Lover. Levin became famous for his long, sentences, full of clauses, subclauses, parentheses, semi-colons and diversions. 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. At the time, the lawyers took revenge on Levin by ensuring that his candidacy for membership of the Garrick, a London club much favoured by lawyers and journalists, was blackballed.

Levin never married or had children, but is survived by his partner Liz Anderson, who tended him during a long decline from Alzheimer's disease.

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. An extract from one of these reads, "Full details of the evidence I would blush to give; lest you should think, however, that I am exaggerating, I append a sample of the less disgusting matter: '. 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. At the Daily Mail in the 1960s, he wrote five 600-word columns a week on top of his theatre reviews.

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. 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. 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. If you wish to license an image, select the portrait of interest to you, then look out for a Use this image button, or contact our Rights and Images service.In May 1990 the government of Singapore responded in this way to a stinging attack by Levin on its prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, laying out its correspondence with the paper and its then editor, Simon Jenkins, now an Evening Standard columnist. Other chapters of food (joyous, and doesnt he like a long sentence), music, theatre, cities, archiecture, travel). He had the rather menial task of having to read all the newspapers and weekly journals, cutting out pieces that might be useful to quote on the air.

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