kept him closely in touch with the daily affairs of the paper. It also gave him ready access to the editor, William Rees Mogg, with whom he developed a good friendship. Levin's brief was to write two columns a week (later three) on any subject that he wished. His range was prodigious; he published nine volumes of his selected journalism of which the first, Taking Sides, covered subjects as diverse as the death watch beetle, Field Marshal Montgomery, Wagner, homophobia, censorship, Eldridge Cleaver, arachnophobia, theatrical nudity, and the North Thames Gas Board. Within weeks of joining The Times Levin provoked a lawsuit and a strident controversy. The first was in March 1971, in an article titled "Profit and dishonour in Fleet Street", accusing Rothermere of underhand conduct and personal avarice during the merger of The Daily Mail and The Daily Sketch. The libel action brought by Rothermere was settled out of court, at substantial cost to the proprietor of The Times, Lord Thomson. Two months later, controversy followed Levin's renewed condemnation of Lord Goddard immediately after the latter's death in May 1971. The legal profession closed ranks and defended Goddard's reputation against Levin's attacks. Among those denouncing Levin were Lords Denning, Devlin, Hodson, Parker, Shawcross and Stow Hill. After Levin's death The Times published an article opining that information made public since 1971 "strongly supported" his criticisms of Goddard. At the time, the lawyers took revenge on Levin by ensuring that his candidacy for membership of the Garrick, a London club much favoured by lawyers and journalists, was blackballed. At The Daily Mail, Levin had generally been restricted to 600 words for his articles. At The Times he had more licence to spread himself. He appeared in The Guinness Book of Records for the longest sentence ever to appear in a newspaper – 1,667 words. He was proud of this, and affected to be outraged when "some bugger in India wrote a sentence very considerably longer". He maintained that he could construct impromptu a sentence of up to 40 subordinate clauses "and many a native of these islands, speaking English as to the manner born, has followed me trustingly into the labyrinth only to perish miserably trying to find the way out". Sometimes Levin wrote about frivolous, even farcical matters, such as a series of mock-indignant articles about the sex-lives of mosquitoes. At other times he wrote about matters of