Political cynicism strode on, quickening its pace; and no wonder. Attempts were made from time to time to authorise the presence of television camera… - Bernard Levin

I said that although the customers of these shops are directly involved, ultimately it concerns everybody, and so it does. For it epitomises two tendencies in our world, and both of them are nasty.

As a child he had been brought up in the grim backstreets of 1930s Somers Town (between St Pancras and Euston stations) by his mother and her parents — Jewish refugees from Lithuania. His father had walked out on them when Bernard was three. That early betrayal, I always felt, explained a lot about why he stayed a bachelor. It was as if he used his intellect to dazzle because he found it difficult to communicate, or commit, on an emotional level.

Courageous, self-willed and frantically energetic, Levin holds strong views which he enunciates with unambiguous force.