its subject. In 22 self-contained chapters, Levin considered various aspects of British life during the decade. Among his topics were prominent people including Harold Macmillan and Harold Wilson – dubbed the Walrus and the Carpenter by Levin – and institutions such as the monarchy, the churches and the British Empire in its last days. Among the individual events examined in the book were the 1968 student riots and the prosecution for obscenity of the publishers of Lady Chatterley's Lover. Levin's interest in indexes developed from his work on The Pendulum Years. He compiled his own index for the book, "and swore a mighty oath, when I had finished the task, that I would rather die, and in a particularly unpleasant manner, than do it again". He contrived to include in his index an obscene joke at the expense of the hapless prosecutor in the Chatterley trial, but found the difficulty of indexing so great that he became a champion of the Society of Indexers. He wrote several articles on the subject, and when reviewing books made a point of praising good indexes and condemning bad ones. The Times In June 1970, during the general election campaign, Levin fell out with the proprietors of The Daily Mail, Lord Rothermere and his son Vere Harmsworth. Levin's contract guaranteed him absolute freedom to write whatever he chose, but Harmsworth, an unswerving Conservative, attempted to censor Levin's support for the other major party, Labour. Levin resigned, and immediately received offers from The Guardian and The Times to join them as a columnist. He found both tempting, and at one point "even had a wild notion of suggesting that I should write for both simultaneously". In the end, he chose The Times, giving as his reason that though the liberal Guardian was more in line with his own politics than the conservative Times, "I wrote more comfortably against the grain of the paper I worked for rather than with it". His obituarist in The Times adds that the decision may also have been swayed by the better remuneration offered by the paper. Among the perquisites of the Times appointment were a company car and a large and splendid office at the paper's building in Printing House Square, London. Levin accepted neither; he could not drive and he hated to be isolated. He commandeered a desk in the anteroom to the editor's office, a location that