Bernard Levin Biography Quotes 5 Report mistakes

Early life
Bernard Levin was born in 1928 in London into a Jewish family, and the city remained the compass point of his voice and sensibility. The turbulence and resourcefulness of interwar and wartime London shaped a boy who loved words, argument, and the exhilaration of the public square. He had no wish to become a scholar in the cloistered sense; his education, formal and informal, pointed him toward the stage of newspapers, where speed, memory, curiosity, and appetite could all be set to work at once. As a young man he devoured drama, music, and politics with equal fervor, roaming theaters and concert halls and then returning home to practice the cadence of the sentences that would later make him famous.

Apprenticeship in print
Levin arrived in journalism in the 1950s, first as a reviewer and feature writer whose copy lifted off the page. He was drawn to magazines and broadsheets that valued opinion and style, and editors quickly learned that he could turn cultural commentary into front-page conversation. By the 1960s his byline had migrated to newspapers of record, and he began the long ascent to national prominence. At The Sunday Times he flourished under the editorship of Harold Evans, who prized his independence and range; at The Times he worked under William Rees-Mogg and later successors who gave him the space, and the unmissable placement, from which he conducted a weekly argument with the nation. He wrote about whatever absorbed him: parliamentary antics, the state of the arts, social policy, international affairs, the liberties of the individual, and the responsibilities of the press itself.

Television and public presence
The new medium of television amplified his reach. Levin became widely known for his appearances in the early 1960s on the groundbreaking satirical program That Was The Week That Was, whose presiding spirit, David Frost, turned the show into a crucible of wit and political scrutiny. Levin's on-air persona was quick, combative, and articulate, and his exchanges with Frost and other performers brought the energy of Fleet Street into Britain's living rooms. He later appeared on interview and discussion programs related to Frost's expanding television ventures, strengthening his reputation as a public intellectual unafraid of cross-examining power or of having his own opinions tested in real time.

Columnist of range and conviction
In print Levin developed a column that could be lyrical about opera on one page and unforgiving about government complacency on the next. He delighted in long, orchestral sentences and in the swift citation of history, literature, and law. He had a talent for making readers care about what he cared about, whether that was the moral claim of dissidents in Eastern Europe, the disorders of British industrial life, or the civilizing function of great music and theater. Prime ministers and party leaders from Harold Wilson to Margaret Thatcher, union chiefs and business magnates, reformers and reactionaries all wandered into his paragraphs and emerged polished by praise or stripped by satire. His judgments were rarely lukewarm, and part of the ritual of the British week became the argument for or against whatever Levin had stated with such fluency.

Books and enthusiasms
Levin was not only a columnist but also a prolific author. He published essay collections and surveys that tried to take the temperature of his times, among them The Pendulum Years, a panorama of British life in the 1960s, and volumes of criticism gathered under titles that signaled his gusto for the things he loved. Travel and history combined in some of his later works, in which he traced the persistence of classical and European themes in modern life. Throughout, the arts provided the deepest aquifer of his enthusiasm. He wrote about opera with a devotee's exactness and a democrat's hope that newcomers might be lured in by candor rather than hushed reverence. Performers, composers, directors, and impresarios were not abstractions to him but living collaborators in the public culture he believed a free society owed itself.

Allies, debates, and relationships
The people around Levin mattered to his development and to his public story. David Frost was the most visible companion in his television years, a foil whose genial manner contrasted with Levin's rapier. In newspapers, the editorial protection and challenge offered by Harold Evans at The Sunday Times helped him to extend his range, while William Rees-Mogg's stewardship at The Times gave him the platform and readers that fixed his name in the country's weekly rhythms. In his private life, his long relationship with the writer Arianna Stassinopoulos, later Arianna Huffington, was formative for both. They traveled, read, and argued together, and she has often described the intellectual companionship they shared; her later career in authorship and media bore traces of the cosmopolitan curiosity and stamina they cultivated in those years. Levin's colleagues and sparring partners across the press, editors, subeditors, rival columnists, and lawyers who lived with the consequences of his fearless phrasing, formed a second family around the deadlines he relished.

Style, controversies, and principles
Levin courted controversy not for its own sake but because he believed the columnist's job was to say clearly what he thought to be true, and then to defend it. He could be scathing about cant and groupthink, impatient with bureaucratic muddle, and unsparing toward public figures who ducked accountability. He also believed firmly in due process and the rights of individuals against the state, themes that recurred in his writing about dissidents abroad and about liberties at home. When he erred, he corrected; when he was challenged, he argued back. The robustness of those exchanges helped to define an era in which the British press embraced confrontation as a route to clarity.

Later years and legacy
In his later years Levin drifted out of public view as illness overtook him, and he died in 2004. Friends and peers marked his passing with tributes that emphasized both his discipline and his joie de vivre: the early mornings, the meticulous drafts, the tireless nights at theater and concert hall, and the convivial lunches where he quarried the anecdotes that became the ore of his journalism. He left no simple school of disciples; instead he left a standard and an example. The standard was exacting prose harnessed to moral seriousness. The example was a life in which the newspaper column, the television studio, and the book-length essay could be instruments of cultural conversation rather than mere vessels for opinion. For a generation of readers and viewers, Bernard Levin made argument a form of entertainment and entertainment a means of education. For the generations after, he remains a benchmark for how a journalist can be both uncompromising and generous: unforgiving of sloppy thinking, delighted by excellence wherever it is found, and convinced, to the end, that words properly used are a public good.

Our collection contains 5 quotes who is written by Bernard, under the main topics: Faith - Health - Sarcastic - Decision-Making - Nostalgia.