Sunday, September 05, 2004

Arianna on Bernard Levin

In Arianna Online, a relationship recalled:

"I first met Bernard Levin on a 'Face the Music' panel. I was there as a curiosity -- a woman with a foreign accent, elected president of the Cambridge Union. He was there as a celebrated columnist for the London Times, an intellectual with an encyclopedic knowledge of music. It was 1971. I was 21, he was 42. He knew nothing about me. I had had a major intellectual crush on him ever since I discovered his writings while at Girton. I had devoured his book 'The Pendulum Years,' and would meticulously cut his columns, underline them, and save them in a file (no, I did not put pressed flowers in the file, but might as well have). So when I found out that he was on the panel, I was reduced to a bundle of inarticulateness. I'm still amazed that in my fog, I actually managed to recognize Schuman's Fourth Symphony. "