spiritual mystery. The book is dedicated "To Arianna, with much more than enthusiasm" – they remained loving friends for the rest of his life. It contains a sentence that far outdoes his earlier 1,667 word effort in The Times, starting on page 212 and ending four pages later; it lists the restaurants most esteemed by Levin in Europe, Asia and America. It also briefly mentions Levin's battle against depression, akin to bipolar disorder. In the 1980s, Levin made three television series for Channel 4. The first, Hannibal's Footsteps, screened in 1985, showed Levin walking the presumed route taken by Hannibal when he invaded Italy in 218 BC.. The programme followed Levin's 320-mile journey from Aigues-Mortes to the crossing into Italy in the Queyras valley. 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. He followed this with To the End of the Rhine in 1987, following the Rhine from its two sources, the Hinterrhein and the Vorderrhein, in Switzerland, to its estuary at Rotterdam, to the north. In between he joined the Swiss citizen army on manoeuvres, visited Liechtenstein bankers, zig-zagged the Swiss–German border at Lake Constance, attended the Schubertiade at Hohenems and the opera at Bregenz, took the waters at Baden-Baden, visited the manufacturers of eau de Cologne, and paid tribute to Erasmus at Basle. The last of the three series was in 1989, A Walk up Fifth Avenue in New York, from Washington Square to the Harlem River. In this series he encountered extremes of wealth and poverty, and met a wide variety of people, some famous (such as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Donald Trump) and some not (including a sword-swallowing unicyclist, and a bag lady in Central Park). He wrote books based on each of the three series, published in 1985, 1987 and 1989 respectively. Last years Levin began to have difficulty with his balance as early as 1988, although Alzheimer's disease was not diagnosed until the early 1990s. 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. Levin retired, though he continued to write for the paper occasionally over the next year. On 7 August 2004, he died