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“... who pondered the Indians and loved playing with his cat (Montaigne amicus, as apostrophised by Bernard Levin in Enthusiasms) for André Tournon’s self-confessed textual ‘cybernetic nightmare ... a text which reads and comments upon itself, a meditating machine operating by itself with interlocking, superimposed circuits, connected by interferences ...”

“... of the bright new talent that was assembled – a formidable roll-call including such names as Bernard Levin, Katharine Whitehorn, Alan Brien and Cyril Ray. Certainly, by the late Fifties the Spectator had already put the wind up the New Statesman – and may even have been partly responsible for the departure of its long-serving editor, Kingsley ...”

“... in Israel, regard as a traitor. Yet in recent months more and more journalists, joined recently by Bernard Levin of the Times, have been demanding Vanunu’s immediate release. If this courageous and gentle man is allowed to go crazy in prison, then that will be as sure a sign as ever that the authorities which imprisoned him are crazier than ...”

“... be ‘Have you met Princess Margaret ... yet?’ At Quentin’s we grew used to finding Koestler, Bernard Levin, Peter Sellers, Ken Tynan, Keith Richards – but none of these quite counted as in her league. As Quentin observes here, with a pretence of puzzlement, ‘even in supposedly relaxed and liberal circles, very few managed to behave normally with ...”

“... a pool of Anthonys and Olivers and Harolds and Hughs. It was thought very funny at the time when Bernard Levin in the Spectator hung the Foreign Secretary’s service on the Hoylake Urban District Council round his neck. But Lloyd was no Pooterish aspirant, with absurd social pretensions, to the inner circle of Tory grandees. Knowing well enough that ...”

“... compensation culture has arisen …’The term seems to have originated in 1993 in an article by Bernard Levin in the Times. Subsequent research found that instances of its use by the press had by 2004 risen from almost zero to more than 450 a year. In 2004 the Better Regulation Task Force, reporting on routes to redress, subheaded its report ...”

“... desperate to deal with spiders from a great height. Arachnophobia was the only sympathy I had with Bernard Levin, who devised a fine solution to the ancient problem of disposing of spiders in the washbasin: an old-fashioned soda-siphon. Taps are too close and you have to touch them to turn them on. There has to be a critical distance between your being ...”

“... welcome, for it has to contend with so many crass assumptions made wherever writers – Bernard Levin, Philippa Pullar – put their hand to food, or food pundits – Michael Smith, Egon Ronay – venture upon writing. The caricaturists of Puritanism did their work early, for the Restoration Court exercised a Reagan-like hold on the media. At ...”

“... is first and foremost a democrat, not the pop-eyed would-be commissar, Mr Zigzag Loon, created by Bernard Levin and other commentators. He argues that ‘the discipline of the marketplace and the discipline imposed by the top people are both equally unattractive. We believe that the self-discipline of full democratic control offers our best hope for the ...”

“... 19th-Century Pamphlets (1934) is often described as an exemplary piece of crime-busting, or as Bernard Levin puts it, ‘a classic of bibliographical detection, a thousandfold more exciting than anything Agatha Christie and her kind ever penned’. It’s a generous compliment, but inexact. In the first place, as I have said, it is not clear what ...”

“... It’s all too much. One can’t easily imagine anyone wasting so much ink and anger over, say, Bernard Levin – Britain’s answer to Podhoretz, roughly speaking. What it boils down to is that Hitchens is only really at home when attacking from the left and that he tends to go for easy targets. The Reagan Administration, awash with ...”

“... it was in a very real sense, the 20th century’s own autobiography.’ Couldn’t her editors (or Bernard Levin who helped her and whose ‘passion for the English language’ she cites) have improved on the ‘mysterious quality of inexhaustibility bursting forth’, or were they seduced by Huffington’s glamour (it bursts forth from the dust ...”

“... which must be asked is how far anti-Quakerism was a form of displacement aggression. Was it, like Bernard Levin belabouring Communism, a convenient way of tarring many less radical movements with guilt by association? The defence of maypoles shows a real hostility to what had become identified as ‘Puritanism’, yet belabouring ‘Puritans’ was a ...”

“... unpleasantly and James the Cold Warrior puts in an appearance. I am sorry to see him joining Bernard Levin in offering a thanksgiving for the bomb which has guaranteed four decades of peace in Europe. It’s true that any talented man’s career must be pursued in the here and now but the price demanded by Après moi le déluge can be too ...”

“... 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 ...”