“... each grant him precedence inside the show as innovator, inspirer, author and performer. Bernard Levin decrees that Milligan has done for television what Gluck did for opera – whatever that was. I am not much wiser when further on told this was to have ‘added a new dimension’, but apparently it is a Good Thing. Who would deny such a man ...”

“... aware of the programme’s limitations: driven by overconfident young men such as David Frost and Bernard Levin, much of its content might generously be called ‘undergraduate humour’. Though politically impudent, it was of its time and place in its unspoken assumptions about such matters as gender and race. (Tynan called such satire ...”

“... and Peter Cook’s suggestion that we call it ‘Quite the best revue I’ve seen for some time. Bernard Levin’, the point being that whatever the notices this could go up at the front of house.27 January. A woman writes to me saying that having read a piece I’d written about him, she has tried to read Kafka but without success. For the same reason ...”

“... their small children, but because Baker promised that if I came out he’d arrange for me to meet Bernard Malamud. Bern taught nearby at the state university in Eugene, Oregon. He’d been in Eugene (pop. 50,000) since leaving New York (pop. 8,000,000) and a night-school teaching job there in 1949 – 12 years in the Far West instructing Oregonian freshmen in ...”

“... rites. Only a few months later, he was in graduate school at Harvard. His mentor there was Harry Levin, the author of a study of realism which Said considered on a par with Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis. As Brennan points out, Levin’s belief in ‘universal interrelatedness’ inspired Said’s own practice of making ...”

“... called Harvey Cohen (Edwin in Frame’s autobiography). Frame fell for his friend George Parlette (Bernard), who ‘laughed heartily and each time he laughed I felt … as if I were a vast empty palace awaiting the guests and the feast’. They had an affair and ate breakfast cakes, as well as corned beef that Reilly sent, along with notes saying ‘I hope you ...”

“... entered the First World War. His masters, as he himself acknowledged, were H.L. Mencken and George Bernard Shaw. Even the most ideologically liquored-up combatant in the culture wars of the last couple of decades might blanch at taking them as models. The sobering fact is that, by the time ‘the last intellectuals’ were in their pomp, it was already too ...”

“... largely finished by 1938, then lost, and finally published only in 1957.Rahel Varnhagen (née Levin) never published a book herself – how could she have done, being Jewish, and a woman, in the Berlin of the early 19th century? But she read Goethe, and wrote thousands of letters, and in her attic salon hosted conversations between great poets, mighty ...”