Obituary: Bernard Levin

Bernard Levin appeared on "TW3"

Bernard Levin's trenchant and widely-read columns lit up British newspapers for many years, delighting his readers with accounts of his current passions, which ranged from the music of Richard Wagner to the honey-bee.

He was brought up in north London at his grandparents' home. They had come from Russia to escape Tsarist persecution at the turn of the century.

When he was three, his parents separated, his Lithuanian-born father going to South Africa to seek his fortune.

Levin said he had been a great deal luckier than some children, but nevertheless, was sure the experience had damaged him psychologically, certainly in his relationships with the opposite sex.

He won a scholarship to Christ's Hospital, the public school at Horsham in West Sussex.

He was one of only a handful of Jewish boys at the school, but his mother did not ask him to be excused chapel.

More than 50 years later, Bernard Levin, in his column for the Times, was still musing over how he was supposed to feel different because he was a Jew, but did not.

Influential columnist

It was as the Spectator's political correspondent that Bernard Levin first made his name, writing about parliament as comic theatre.

He was famed for being erudite and waspish

He became the London television critic of what was then the Manchester Guardian, before becoming a household name with his contributions to the ground-breaking satirical television show, That Was the Week That Was.

On one dramatic occasion, a man whose actress wife had felt the rough edge of Levin's critical pen confronted her tormentor in menacing fashion on live television.

But it was through his column in The Times that Bernard Levin perhaps made his most significant contribution.

It was said that incoming editors were told that they could change anything, except the crossword and Bernard Levin's column.

Enemy of the tyrants

Assessing the achievements of Bernard Levin, the late John Grigg, writer of the most recent volume of the official history of the Times, said: "His style has every virtue except economy."

Levin's talent for stirring controversy was unsurpassed, said Grigg. And his supreme merit was that he was the enemy of all tyrants, from the pettiest to the grandest.

Levin retraced Hannibal's footsteps across the Alps

Bernard Levin also wrote several books, some of them about one of his consuming passions, travel, including Hannibal's Footsteps and To the End of the Rhine, both of which were made into television series.

His other great love was music, describing it as "the mainstay of my life".

After a lifetime writing about his prejudices and passions, Bernard Levin described himself as "an eternal optimist".

He said he had no religious faith, in the sense that he did not adhere to any creed or church, but he was certain the world was not an accident and that it had a meaning and a purpose.