Biography

He was famous for his Times column which he wrote between 1971 and 1997, and also wrote for the Spectator, Daily Mail and the Daily Express. Ill health forced him to scale back his commitments, but he continued to contribute pieces to The Times until July 1998.

He was brought up in north London at his grandparents' home. They had come from Russia to escape Tsarist persecution at the turn of the century. When he was three, his parents separated, his Lithuanian-born father going to South Africa to seek his fortune.

In 1963 he was famously punched by writer Desmond Leslie (in front of an audience of millions) on the BBC TV programme "That Was The Week That Was", which was transmitted live. Levin had given a bad review of the one-woman stage show "From Brecht to Brecht: Cabarets of Savagery and Delight", which had been devised by and starred Leslie's then wife, Agnes Bernelle. Despite the fisticuffs, Levin refused to press charges against Leslie. The producer of the TV show, Ned Sherrin, swore he had seen the two men having a friendly drink in the BBC bar an hour or so later.

He had a long relationship with Arianna Stassinopolous (later Huffington), starting in the 1970s, but they never married. After his death, she claimed they had broken up because he refused to father a child by her, and that he had been the great love of her life.

He claimed to dislike the cinema, and hardly ever saw films (although he acted in one, "Nothing But The Best", which was directed by his cousin, Clive Donner). He was, however, a great enthusiast for Abel Gance's "Napoleon" (he admitted that he had never heard of its director before seeing it) and the films of Steven Spielberg, in particular "Close Encounters Of The Third Kind" and "E.T.", both of which he wrote about at length.