Levin was the subject of gossip column speculation in the early Seventies when he began a five-year relationship with author Arianna Stassinopoulous, a former president of the Cambridge Union and now, as Arianna Huffington, a US Republican politician.

He was educated at Christ's Hospital and the London School of Economics, where he read government, expecting to pursue a career in politics rather than reporting it. Levin was happy to make fun of his obsession with Wagner; in a 1989 piece not concerned with music but about racism he began, "Will everybody please keep calm; this is not going to be about Wagner, however ominous the evidence. He invented comical names for politicians - thus did the then Conservative attorney general Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller became Sir Reginald Bullying Manner.Meeting him in London the publisher Rupert Hart-Davis did not immediately recognise him: "He looks about sixteen, and at first I thought he was someone’s little boy brought along to see the fun – very Jewish, with wavy fairish hair, very intelligent and agreeable to talk to". It was a strange experience to hear this paragon of logic, sceptical of all humbug trotting out stories that normally he would have scoffed at. Levin became a broadcaster, first on the weekly satirical television show That Was the Week That Was in the early 1960s, then as a panellist on a musical quiz, Face the Music, and finally in three series of travel programmes in the 1980s. It was part of a recurring pattern which led him to support figures he should have detested such as Richard Nixon and his vice-president Spiro Agnew. The libel action brought by Rothermere was settled out of court, at substantial cost to the proprietor of The Times, Lord Thomson.

He explains in captivating prose his understanding and love for various experiences of humanity, such as Shakespeare, or taking long walks.His fellow pupils, mostly from a very different kind of background, renamed them the Little Levin Library - eventually throwing them out of the window. Levin was a frequent panel member along with, among others, Robin Ray, Joyce Grenfell, David Attenborough and Richard Baker.

For his friends, it was unbearably painful to watch his struggle to retrieve even the simplest word. Levin became famous for his long, sentences, full of clauses, subclauses, parentheses, semi-colons and diversions. When Lord Chief Justice Goddard died aged 94, Levin penned a strongly-worded attack on him that so infuriated the legal establishment he was blackballed from the Garrick Club. After a short spell in a lowly job at the BBC selecting press cuttings for use in programmes, he secured a post as a junior member of the editorial staff of a weekly periodical, Truth, in 1953.The proprietor and editor of the long-established weekly The Spectator, Ian Gilmour, invited Levin to join his staff. In the local streets, the school's conspicuous uniform, including a blue coat, knee breeches and yellow socks, attracted unwanted attention.