Born in Camden Town, London, in 1928, Bernard Levin was one of the most erudite, influential, and controversial journalists of the past half-century. His twice-weekly columns for The Times, written between 1971 and 1997, were collected in nine volumes. He also composed books of travel essays and served as a commentator and panelist on various British television programs.
An ardent admirer of Michel Montaigne and H.L. Mencken, Levin shared their predilection for witty, iconoclastic, and well-polished prose. He was famous (some would say notorious) for composing long sentences laced with subordinate clauses and generously punctuated with semicolons. At one time he appeared in The Guinness Book of Records for what he claimed was "the longest sentence ever to appear in a newspaper. One thousand six hundred and sixty-seven words. Then some bugger in India wrote a sentence very considerably longer."
Harold Evans, who for a short time was Levin's editor at The Times, said that his sentences were like the corridors of a Venetian palace: "You know there is something good at the end, but occasionally your feet ache getting there." Here, in addition to offering some of Levin's observations on writers and writing, we have included a sentence in which he used 109 consecutive adjectives to describe the Conservative government of the day.
- On Composing Long Sentences
I am quite capable of speaking, unprepared, a sentence containing anything up to forty subordinate clauses all embedded in their neighbours like those wooden Russian dolls, and many a native of these islands, speaking English as to the manner born, has followed me trustingly into the labyrinth only to perish miserably trying to find the way out; I had visions of some new de Ruyter, egged on by his infuriated countrymen, sailing up the Medway and sacking Chatham.
(Bernard Levin, "Or I'm a Dutchman," The Times, January 19, 1985) - On the Rules of Grammar
You can break every grammatical and syntactical rule consciously when, and only when, you have rendered yourself incapable of breaking them unconsciously.
(quoted by Arianna Huffington, "Bernard Levin Remembered," Ariannaonline.com, August 17, 2004) - On Being a Journalist
I am a journalist because I have no other talent for any other job. I am not exaggerating. I couldn't teach, I couldn't paint, I couldn't compose, I couldn't be a businessman. The only possible exception was the Bar. Otherwise I am totally useless.
(quoted by BBC News, "Broadcaster Levin Dies at Age 75," August 10, 2004) - On Mixed Metaphors
The cure for mixed metaphors, I have always found, is for the patient to be obliged to draw a picture of the result.
(In These Times, Jonathan Cape, 1986) - On Euphemisms
Once, we referred to people whose bodies were deformed or incomplete, whether by injury or genetics, as cripples. At some point, the word became, or was decreed to be, socially unacceptable, and such unfortunates were renamed handicapped. Further dilution was demanded, and they became disabled. More time went by, and even that proved too strong for those who decide these matters (who, incidentally, are almost never the sufferers themselves); now we must get used to the word "disadvantaged." And it is not only people, but nations: for backward begat under-developed, and under-developed begat developing, and developing begat Third World. . . .
But does a man with no legs leap up and walk when he is called disadvantaged? Is there less drought and famine in the Third World than in the backward nations? Has the underprivileged man more money in his pocket than his neighbour who is poor?
All euphemisms are lies. They are lies told for a particular purpose, and that purpose is to change reality. But no man can change reality, particularly by doing no more than wave a word at it. Then why the pretence? Because reality is very often painful, and it is the very bedrock and foundation of our world that no one should be obliged to suffer pain. Nor, the rule continues, shall anyone be obliged to suffer poverty, ill-health, disappointment, loss, bad luck, failure or an ugly face; since there is no way of avoiding all these, or for that matter any of them, we change their names, and think we have abolished them.
("An Antidote to the Poison of Euphemism," The Times, March 17, 1987)
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