- 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 show From Brecht to Brecht, Cabarets of Savagery and Delight, which featured Leslie's then wife Agnes Bernelle.
- 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.
- In the early 1960s, he became quite openly infatuated with Vanessa Redgrave, and his reviews of her performances in various classical parts (especially her famous role as Rosalind in "As You Like It") were widely regarded as open love letters, rather than dramatic criticism. In fact, Levin actually did propose marriage to her, but she gently turned him down, being about to marry the director Tony Richardson. He never forgave her; although he continued to admit that she was a fine actress, he reviled her in print, ostensibly for her left-wing political beliefs, for well over thirty years.
- He won a scholarship to Christ's Hospital, the public school at Horsham in West Sussex.
- Appointed a CBE for "services to journalism" in 1990.
- He wrote several books, some of them about one of his consuming passions, travel, including Hannibal's Footsteps and To the End of the Rhine, both of which were made into television series.
- He also wrote The Pendulum Years, Taking Sides, Speaking Up and The Way We Live Now.
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