Close Encounters Of The Third Kind" is a film that lingers on the retina of the mind like the image of a light stared at before the eyes are closed. It helped that I share many of his enthusiasms - reading, walking, art, cities, landscapes - but even when I didn't, I enjoyed his passion for his subject.

Whimsical 250 page book written in 1983 where Bernard Levin - working class london lad from a family of Jewish refugees - pontificates on 8 topics that bring him joy. The book is dedicated "To Arianna, with much more than enthusiasm" – they remained loving friends for the rest of his life. Their job was to convey to voters the majesty of our legislators' oratory, to remind us of the surpassing importance of their deliberations. He remained true to his declared intention of eschewing all forms of vehicular transport, and walked all the way, with the exception of his crossing the Rhone, rowing himself in a small boat.the males either attached their claspers to a female's cerci or else clasped her terminal sternum, and in either case only lightly. His range was prodigious; he published nine volumes of his selected journalism of which the first, Taking Sides, covered subjects as diverse as the death watch beetle, Field Marshal Montgomery, Wagner, homophobia, censorship, Eldridge Cleaver, arachnophobia, theatrical nudity, and the North Thames Gas Board.

When we went to the opera together and there was no possibility of my getting up the stairs, he would insist on carrying me in the way that more brawny friends would do. He gave a fellow-critic an edition of Shaw's collected criticism, writing inside the cover, "'In the hope that when you come across the phrases I have already stolen you will keep quiet about it". When he arrived to pick them up, he brought with him a spray of flowers which they had to pin on their dress, or sometimes, even more embarrassing, a garland for their hair. Some viewers were delighted one evening, when a man strode on to the set and punched Bernard, knocking him off his stool.He wrote several articles on the subject, and when reviewing books made a point of praising good indexes and condemning bad ones. Levin's noticeably Jewish surname, together with such skills as he had acquired in shorthand and typing, gained him immediate acceptance. From September 1995, his Times column appeared once weekly instead of twice, and in January 1997 the editor, Peter Stothard, concluded, despite a great admiration for Levin, that the weekly column should cease.