Bernard Levin was the most famous journalist of his day. Prolific, controversial, passionate, versatile, maddening, enthusiastic, sometimes irresponsible, always courageous, he was recognised instantly in the street by people of all ages. This was no mean achievement, since for more than 25 years he had been primarily identified not with any mass-market tabloid but with a single broadsheet newspaper.

It was in January 1971 that Bernard Levin’s byline started appearing regularly in The Times. Through radio and television he was already a public figure. The previous year he had published his first book, The Pendulum Years, a commentary on Britain in the 1960s. He had also, since 1962, been writing regularly for Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail, contributing latterly five 600-word columns a week as well as acting as the paper’s theatre critic. But he had had a disagreement at Associated Newspapers and — renowned for the fluency and pungency of his writing — was known to be on the market.

Both The Guardian and The Times made bids for him, and Levin opted for the latter, despite having previously enjoyed a stint on The Guardian as a lively weekly columnist writing about the early days of commercial television. The reason he gave for choosing The Times was that he thought it would be advantageous to “write against the grain” of the paper.

But this was probably only half the truth, for Levin had long since abandoned the firebrand socialism of his youth, and in due course he was thought by many to be the grain of the paper. Money may have been a more powerful inducement. Then in his early forties, he had already become accustomed to a lifestyle that included the better class of restaurant, with wine to match.

The Times was pleased with its capture. Levin was “savage, clever, cunning, witty and brilliant” according to the front-page announcement of his arrival — strong words in those days. He declined any formal letter of engagement, instead drawing up his own contract, the most important clause of which demanded that his copy should not be altered except with his personal consent. He had never got on well with sub-editors.

Orders went out for him to be given appropriately stylish accommodation at Printing House Square, but Levin took one look at it and decided to set up his stall in the anteroom to the Editor’s office. (He spurned the two perks of most ambitious journalists, a company car and a private room. He did not drive and he disliked office seclusion.) The move proved a typically shrewd one. It put him right at the centre of things, and gave him immediate access to the Editor. When The Times moved to new premises in Gray’s Inn Road shortly afterwards, he insisted on the same arrangement.

There were also personal advantages. Despite a number of female liaisons, some of which were much publicised, Levin remained a bachelor. But he liked to be cossetted. This he was, by a gaggle of secretaries including the Editor’s as well as his own. Levin responded to all the kindnesses shown. Birthdays and high days were celebrated with sumptuous cakes, and Levin ran the secretaries’ pools syndicate. Later he would struggle into the office each Christmas bearing bottles of excellent champagne, one for every individual who had anything to do with his copy at any stage.

But the crucial relationship was with William Rees-Mogg. On the surface, the two men were very different, despite sharing a public-school education. Levin’s background was poor and Jewish, Rees-Mogg’s was comfortable and Catholic. But both liked to argue an unfashionable case. Rees-Mogg was fond of claiming that he and Bernard were the only two true Whigs on the paper. Levin made few close friends on The Times, but he established an immediate rapport with the Editor who had hired him. Together they tried out ideas, even words, on one another, with Levin drifting into the editorial office two or three times a day. Rees-Mogg reciprocated by defending Levin to the hilt when he was under attack from affronted lawyers or outraged readers, as he frequently was in the early days.

When Rees-Mogg stood down as Editor in March 1981, there were rumours that Levin would follow suit — and these soon proved to be true. He had made no secret of his preference for Charles Douglas-Home over the man appointed to succeed Rees-Mogg, Harold Evans. His decision to withdraw was thus probably inevitable: Levin, claiming the need for a rest, took a sabbatical throughout most of the 12-month period of Evans’s editorship. But when Douglas-Home replaced Evans in March 1982, Levin was ready to return and the paper was eager to have him back. The first words of his resumed column were, famously, “And another thing.”

By then, he was a Times institution. The circulation-builder had become a circulation-prop with a considerable personal following. One subsequent Editor, with a marked antipathy to Times institutions, considered terminating the Levin agreement, but wisely thought better of it. In early 1995 Levin remarked casually in the course of a column that he had written more than 2,000 articles for the paper. Gibraltar may crumble, the Rockies may tumble — but Levin was there to stay.

For years, his was the essential newspaper column. Forthright and punchy, it was much indebted to an American columnist of an earlier era, his beloved H. L. Mencken, but also spiced with Shakespeare, Dickens and the poets. Levin was a stylist par excellence. Famous for long sentences, he once produced a 1,500-word column with only one full stop. His notice of a very dull play consisted entirely of a description of the scenery. And he could always knock out opponents with a turn of phrase, as when he mocked an argument as “the thin end of a slippery slope”, or wrote of the songwriting team: “In the rich cornucopia of their art, it was always Mr Rodgers who supplied the copia and Mr Hammerstein the corn”. He was even able to review in verse — a very dangerous expedient — as he once did in an ode beginning

The verse of Edna St Vincent Millay
Strikes me as dull and faintly sillay.

But Levin’s writing was by no means all lighthearted. He expressed his disgust and contempt for authoritarian regimes at great length, and was haunted by the Holocaust. For years he denounced the Soviet Union and its fellow travellers in the West, and in 1989 his long-held belief that the communist system would collapse under its own weight was vindicated. Indefatigable, he turned to excoriating China.

He was born Henry Bernard Levin and grew up in the backstreets of Camden Town behind St Pancras station. His father left home for South Africa when Bernard was a small child, and he was brought up mainly by his grandparents, who had arrived in Britain from Lithuania at the turn of the century. A Times colleague who managed to penetrate the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, in the early 1970s sent Levin a postcard of the Church of St Bernard there. On return he was greeted with: “I knew I would always be honoured in the family seat.”