The Pendulum Years: Britain in the Sixties

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Levin was the subject of gossip column speculation in the early Seventies when he began a five-year relationship with author Arianna Stassinopoulous, a former president of the Cambridge Union and now, as Arianna Huffington, a US Republican politician. 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. In 1981 Levin took a sabbatical from The Times after Rupert Murdoch bought the paper and Harold Evans succeeded Rees-Mogg as editor. Being driven by a woman to Glyndebourne, he became convinced that other drivers were sneering at him. He looked about 16, phenomenally clean with scrubbed nails and a coil of dark hair like a bedspring lunging from his forehead .

He battled on many fronts at Christ's Hospital: he was a Jew at a Church of England establishment; he was from a poor family (although Christ's Hospital is a charity school); he was slight of stature; he was utterly indifferent to sport; he adopted a Marxist stance, hanging the Red Flag from a school window to celebrate the Labour victory in 1945. Levin's noticeably Jewish surname, together with such skills as he had acquired in shorthand and typing, gained him immediate acceptance.In 1971, Levin appeared in an edition of Face the Music along with a new panellist, Arianna Stassinopoulos (later known as Arianna Huffington). His pieces could be absolutely savage in their attacks, on bankers, lawyers, dictators, anti-Semites. 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. The first was in March 1971, in an article titled "Profit and dishonour in Fleet Street", accusing Rothermere of underhand conduct and personal avarice during the merger of The Daily Mail and The Daily Sketch.

Levin became famous for his long, sentences, full of clauses, subclauses, parentheses, semi-colons and diversions. It also gave him ready access to the editor, William Rees Mogg, with whom he developed a good friendship. What is significant is that he came, not from a news or reporting background, but from theatre criticism.

Apart from this column, which earned him the hatred of many MPs, he wrote separate articles commenting on the law - in particular what he saw as the folly of judges - civil servants and other public figures.