Search Results

“... For all his faults, the absence of Bernard Levin has been one of the best reasons for missing the Times during the months it has been off the streets. His first book since The Pendulum Years, and indeed only the second book he has ever published, Taking Sides is part compensation for not being able to read his latest opinions in less durable form ...”

“... about it, and an orgiastic one, where one is cosmically-life-affirmingly-overwhelmed by it, as Bernard Levin is. What we are talking about when we talk about opera becomes an intriguing moral moment. People who talk about it well seem to do it very well, to be able to be large-minded and yet sceptical at the same time. (True Wagnerians do not think ...”

“... Street. Here was a then-regular sodality, consisting at different times of Kingsley Amis, Bernard Levin, Robert Conquest, Anthony Powell, Russell Lewis and assorted others, and calling itself with heavy and definite self-mockery ‘Bertorelli’s Blackshirts’. The conversational scheme was simple (I think it had evolved from a once-famous ...”

“... You cannot keep politics out of the other sort of spy story. William Buckley is a kind of American Bernard Levin, a famous columnist of great personal charm and nasty right-wing views. Like Levin, he has a baroque prose style, favouring long sentences that branch off in unexpected directions; and when he wants to say ...”

“... for Cecil Beaton, and, for Margaret Thatcher, a ‘No Milk Today’ tag hanging from her nipple. Bernard Levin, who alone appears twice in the book, is once parked under the bosom of Arianna Stassinopoulos. Marcia Falkender holds the PM, a ventriloquist’s dummy, on her knee. Tom Driberg is adjacent to a Gents. So far so good. But why is Germaine Greer ...”

“... Soviet Union will no longer be able to maintain itself as a first-rate power. Mr James deprecates Bernard Levin: ‘The things he says are mainly his, not somebody else’s. But he says them over and over.’ If this were truly a book, and its author truly terse, there would not be these recyclings within recyclings. But Mr James, though he writes with ...”

“... of the Conservative Party, most of Fleet Street, 70 Tory MPs, 62 per cent of the British public, Bernard Levin, 90 per cent of telephone callers to Conservative Central Office and a briefcase full of letters from Mr Parkinson’s constituents. Forty-two bishops stayed silent. The overwhelming consensus during, and after, the ten-day life-span of Mr ...”

“... was drawn into what seemed an endless riotous party in which other merrymakers were George Melly, Bernard Levin, Harold Pinter, Alan Brien and the joyfully randy Mick Mulligan of the Magnolia Jazz Band. The account of the pranks they get up to is amusing only in patches – other people’s drunken excesses tend to be boring. The whole jamboree is set in ...”

“... Second-hand book dealers will tell you that of all Bernard Shaw’s out-of-print works, the volumes of music criticism have been in most constant demand. It is therefore excellent news (except perhaps to second-hand book dealers) that the Bodley Head has now issued, in the same chunky format as the Collected Plays, these three volumes containing all Shaw’s writings on music ...”

“... one, Gandhi’s one, or Mandela’s one. Noam Chomsky: nil. E.P Thompson: nil. The Times columnist Bernard Levin: two. Levin deserves a special mention. In the Times in May 1996, he implied that Jerry, a Newbury road-protester, planned a firebombing campaign. I know Jerry. He was the victim not the perpetrator of just ...”

“... Bernard Levin recently summed up in one sentence the most ambiguous form of mental sickness in our age: ‘But there are those who live by an enervated reason that owns no master in the soul, and who can find arguments that enable them to claim that the atrophy of the moral sense from which they suffer is in fact a form of rational judgment ...”

“... well. It also calls to mind a point made about the spirit of this time by its earlier chronicler, Bernard Levin in The Pendulum Years: ‘It was a credulous age, perhaps the most credulous ever, and the more rational, the less gullible, the decade claimed to be, the less rational, the more gullible, it showed itself.’ Angela Carter’s assertions will ...”

“... promoted as part of that paper’s ‘I’m Backing Britain’ campaign. Of ‘Now and Then’, Bernard Levin rather tastelessly observed, years later, that it ‘made many regret their impulsive rejoicing at the death of his predecessor’. Even Day Lewis’s admiring editor and close friend, Ian Parsons, when he was putting together a Collected ...”

“... enough, has never found her at her best. Then again, though its principal export (as we know from Bernard Levin) is Kiri Te Kanawa, it has been through most of its history a land without opera. Nor is it easy to see New Zealand as a millionaire’s playground or the resort of the cultural jet-set, unless things have changed radically since my time in the ...”

“... and generous appraisal of his novels.The star fiction-reviewers were brought out in force: Bernard Levin (Sunday Times), Auberon Waugh (Daily Mail), John Osborne in the very first ‘John Osborne Review’ in the New Standard, a launching to which Quentin Oates devoted some well-placed sarcasms in one of the pieces by him on Amis’s ...”