In These Times

by Bernard Levin (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1988

  $3.29

• Used

  Hardcover
  1986

  $4.24

  'Freedom, responsibility and art are the themes I now return to most often. I always did write about them, but now they make up a greater, and still increasing, proportion of my writing,' declares Bernard Levi in this, the fourth anthology of his journalism. They are timeless questions which, in addressing with fresh evidence, and from ever new aspects, Levin makes vital to the moment. He pleads in this volume not only for the victims of oppression at the hands of foreign totalitarian powers - for Lithuanian Balys Gajauskas in the Gulag and Jaroslav Javorsky suffering in Czechoslovakian prison - but also for freedom mfrom fanaticism and jargon in our own society. He explains why the taking of our responsibility for our personal actions will soon become the crucial issue of our time, and why the art of Francis Bacon will not. Levin leads us on an old fashioned treasure hunt through Tehran which must have left the Russian embassy there madly tryring to decode the 'capitalist sense of humour'. We go to the steps of the Grand Hotel in Brightpn just after the bombing and are offered reassurance in the act of Mrs Thatcher tidying her hair. We stop over at a South African courtroom where impudence is the order of the day. A stern critic of 'personspeak', Bernard Levin here extols the merits of the Society of Indexers. He rebukes airline cabin staff for subjecting us to a Nanny State when we fly and explains how to tell a joke on Dutch television. Exposure to Pre-Raphaelite art may once have driven him to babbling with sheep in the Quantocks, but art which is lasting and true finds in Bernard Levin one of its most profound and articulate enthusiasts. Transplants, seals and Mozart's librettist - from art to apartheid, from rat poison to Voltaire's marginalia on the pages of Rousseau - whatever his subject, Bernard Levin never fails to entertain, inform and prompt a reaction. It is not enough for this supreme journalist to be engaging, provocative and funny, he must jolt us into taking another look at ourselves.