The Pendulum Years

The Pendulum Years is a first edition published in London by Jonathan Cape in 1970. Its subtitle, Britain and the Sixties, signals its focus: a long look at a decade of British life, running to 420 pages.

The author, Henry Bernard Levin, was born in 1928 to a poor Jewish family in London and died in 2004. He was an English journalist, writer and broadcaster. A scholarship took him to Christ's Hospital, and he later graduated from the London School of Economics in 1952. After brief work at the BBC, he joined the staff of the weekly Truth in 1953. He went on to review television for The Manchester Guardian and to write a political column for The Spectator, whose irreverent style influenced later parliamentary sketches. In the 1960s he contributed five columns a week to the Daily Mail, and in 1970 he moved to The Times as resident columnist, a role he held until his retirement apart from a break of about a year in 1981 and 1982.

Levin was also a familiar face on television, first on the satirical show That Was The Week That Was, then as a panellist on the musical quiz Face the Music, and later in three series of travel programmes in the 1980s. He published 17 books between 1970 and 1998. From the early 1990s he was affected by Alzheimer's disease, which led him to give up his regular column in 1997 and to stop writing not long after.