1. Bernard Levin became a broadcaster, first on the weekly satirical television show That Was the Week That Was in the early 1960s, then as a panellist on a musical quiz, Face the Music, and finally in three series of travel programmes in the 1980s.
Bernard Levin began to write books in the 1970s, publishing 17 between 1970 and 1998.
Bernard Levin was born on 19 August 1928 in London, the second child and only son of Philip Bernard Levin, a tailor of Jewish Bessarabian descent, and his wife, Rose, nee Racklin.
Philip Bernard Levin abandoned the family when Bernard Levin was a child, and the two children were brought up with the help of their maternal grandparents, who had emigrated from Lithuania at the turn of the 20th century.
The Bernard Levin household was not especially musical, though it had a piano which Judith was taught to play; Rose Bernard Levin bought her son a violin and paid for lessons, convinced that he was "destined to be the next Kreisler or Heifetz".
Bernard Levin persevered ineptly for two and a half years and then gave up with relief.
Bernard 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.
Macnutt was a strict, even bullying, teacher, and was feared rather than loved by his pupils, but Bernard Levin learned Classics well, and acquired a lifelong fondness for placing Latin tags and quotations in his writing.
Bernard Levin battled on many fronts at Christ's Hospital: he was a Jew at a Church of England establishment; he was from a poor family ; 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.
At concerts by the school orchestra, Bernard Levin listened seriously to music for the first time.
The food at the school was no such consolation; according to Bernard Levin it was so appalling that there must be something better to be found, and from his late teens he sought out the best restaurants he could afford.
Bernard Levin hoped to go to the University of Cambridge, but, as his obituarist in The Times wrote, he "was not considered Oxbridge material".
Bernard Levin was accepted by the London School of Economics, where he studied from 1948 to 1952.
Bernard Levin's talents were recognised and encouraged by LSE tutors including Karl Popper and Harold Laski; Levin's deep affection for both did not prevent his perfecting a comic impersonation of the latter.
Bernard Levin became a skilled debater; he wrote for the student newspaper The Beaver, on a range of subjects, not least opera, which became one of his lifelong passions.
Bernard Levin's job was to read all the newspapers and weekly magazines, selecting articles that might be useful for broadcasting.
In 1953, Bernard Levin applied for a job on the weekly periodical Truth.
Bernard Levin was offered the post of "general editorial dogsbody, which was exactly what I had been looking for".
Mooney describes his television reviews as "notably punchy" and The Times commented, "Bernard Levin took out his shotgun and let loose with both barrels".
Bernard Levin gave the opening programmes a kindly review, but by the fourth day of commercial television he was beginning to baulk: "There has been nothing to get our teeth into apart from three different brands of cake-mix and a patent doughnut".
In 1956, Bernard Levin found himself in irreconcilable disagreement with Truth's support of the Anglo-French military action in the Suez Crisis.
The proprietor and editor of the long-established weekly The Spectator, Ian Gilmour, invited Bernard Levin to join his staff.
Bernard Levin left Truth and became the political correspondent of The Spectator.
Bernard Levin declared that he was no expert in politics, but Gilmour advised him, "review it as you would review television".
Bernard Levin wrote his column under the pseudonym "Taper", from the name of a corrupt political insider in Disraeli's 1844 novel Coningsby.
Bernard Levin followed Gilmour's advice, becoming, as The Guardian's Simon Hoggart said, "the father of the modern parliamentary sketch":.
Bernard Levin invented unflattering nicknames; he wrote later, "I did not think of calling Sir Hartley Shawcross Sir Shortly Floorcross, but I did call Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller Sir Reginald Bullying-Manner".
Bernard Levin wrote on a wide range of subjects, from a campaign for the release of three Arabs imprisoned by the British authorities, to supporting publication of the banned novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, and denunciation of the retired Lord Chief Justice, Lord Goddard.
The last led to a secret meeting of more than 20 senior judges to see whether Bernard Levin could be prosecuted for criminal libel; there was no prosecution, and his accusations about Goddard's vindictiveness, deceit and bias have relatively recently been claimed to have been justified.
In 1959, Gilmour, while remaining as proprietor, stepped down as editor and was succeeded by his deputy, Brian Inglis; Bernard Levin took over from Inglis as assistant editor.
Later in that year, after the general election victory of another of his betes noires, Harold Macmillan, Bernard Levin gave up the Taper column, professing himself to be in despair.
Concurrently with his work at The Spectator, Bernard Levin was the drama critic of The Daily Express from 1959, offending many in theatrical circles by his outspoken verdicts.
Bernard Levin modelled his reviewing style on that of Bernard Shaw's musical reviews of the late 19th century.
Bernard Levin gave a fellow-critic an edition of Shaw's collected criticism, writing inside the cover, "'In the hope that when you come across the phrases I have already stolen you will keep quiet about it".
Gilmour discouraged any hopes Bernard Levin might have had of succeeding Inglis as editor and in 1962, Bernard Levin left both The Spectator and The Daily Express, becoming drama critic of The Daily Mail.
Bernard Levin remained there for eight years, and for the last five of them wrote five columns a week on any subject of his choice.
Bernard Levin was invited to appear regularly on BBC television's new weekly late-night satirical revue, That Was the Week That Was, where he delivered monologues to camera about his pet hates and conducted interviews, appearing as "a tiny figure taking on assorted noisy giants in debate".
Bernard Levin was twice assaulted on air, once by the husband of an actress whose show Bernard Levin had reviewed severely, and once by a woman astrologer who squirted him with water.
Bernard Levin was a frequent panel member along with, among others, Robin Ray, Joyce Grenfell, David Attenborough and Richard Baker.
In 22 self-contained chapters, Bernard Levin considered various aspects of British life during the decade.
Bernard Levin compiled his own index for the book, "and swore a mighty oath, when I had finished the task, that I would rather die, and in a particularly unpleasant manner, than do it again".
Bernard Levin wrote several articles on the subject, and when reviewing books made a point of praising good indexes and condemning bad ones.
In June 1970, during the general election campaign, Bernard Levin fell out with the proprietors of The Daily Mail, Lord Rothermere and his son Vere Harmsworth.
Bernard Levin's contract guaranteed him absolute freedom to write whatever he chose, but Harmsworth, an unswerving Conservative, attempted to censor Bernard Levin's support for the other major party, Labour.
Bernard Levin resigned, and immediately received offers from The Guardian and The Times to join them as a columnist.
Bernard Levin found both tempting, and at one point "even had a wild notion of suggesting that I should write for both simultaneously".
Bernard Levin accepted neither; he could not drive and he hated to be isolated.
Bernard Levin commandeered a desk in the anteroom to the editor's office, a location that kept him closely in touch with the daily affairs of the paper.
Bernard Levin's brief was to write two columns a week on any subject that he wished.
Bernard Levin's range was prodigious; he published nine volumes of his selected journalism of which the first, Taking Sides, covered subjects as diverse as the death watch beetle, Field Marshal Montgomery, Wagner, homophobia, censorship, Eldridge Cleaver, arachnophobia, theatrical nudity, and the North Thames Gas Board.
Two months later, controversy followed Bernard Levin's renewed condemnation of Lord Goddard immediately after the latter's death in May 1971.
At the time, the lawyers took revenge on Bernard Levin by ensuring that his candidacy for membership of the Garrick, a London club much favoured by lawyers and journalists, was blackballed.
At The Daily Mail, Bernard Levin had generally been restricted to 600 words for his articles.
Bernard Levin maintained that he could construct impromptu a sentence of up to 40 subordinate clauses "and many a native of these islands, speaking English as to the manner born, has followed me trustingly into the labyrinth only to perish miserably trying to find the way out".
Bernard Levin wrote about performers he admired, including Otto Klemperer, Alfred Brendel, and Kiri Te Kanawa.
Bernard Levin turned less regularly to the visual arts, but when he did his views were clear-cut and trenchantly expressed.
Bernard Levin wrote of a Pre-Raphaelite exhibition in 1984, "Never, in all my life, not even at the exclusively Millais exhibition in 1967, have I seen so much sickening rubbish in one place at one time".
Bernard Levin's knowledge and love of literature were reflected in many of his writings; among his best-known pieces is a long paragraph about the influence of Shakespeare on everyday discourse.
In 1971, Bernard Levin appeared in an edition of Face the Music along with a new panellist, Arianna Stassinopoulos.
Bernard Levin was commissioned by the BBC to visit musical festivals around the world, broadcasting a series of talks about them.
Bernard Levin later wrote a book, Conducted Tour on the same subject.
At the age of 30, she remained deeply in love with him but longed to have children; Bernard Levin never wanted to marry or be a father.
Bernard Levin concluded that she must break away, and moved to New York in 1980.
In 1981 Bernard Levin took a sabbatical from The Times after Rupert Murdoch bought the paper and Harold Evans succeeded Rees-Mogg as editor.
Bernard Levin never published an autobiography, but his book Enthusiasms, published in 1983, consists of chapters on his principal pleasures: books, pictures, cities, walking, Shakespeare, music, food and drink, and spiritual mystery.
The first, Hannibal's Footsteps, screened in 1985, showed Bernard Levin walking the presumed route taken by Hannibal when he invaded Italy in 218 BC.
Bernard Levin remained true to his declared intention of eschewing all forms of vehicular transport, and walked all the way, with the exception of his crossing the Rhone, rowing himself in a small boat.
Bernard Levin wrote books based on each of the three series, published in 1985,1987 and 1989 respectively.
Bernard Levin began to have difficulty with his balance as early as 1988, although Alzheimer's disease was not diagnosed until the early 1990s.
Bernard Levin retired, though he continued to write for the paper occasionally over the next year.
Bernard Levin was appointed CBE for services to journalism in 1990.
Bernard Levin was an honorary fellow of the LSE from 1977, and a member of the Order of Polonia Restituta, conferred by the Polish government-in-exile in 1976.