Our lives impacted in three ways, two of them relating to the London School of Economics.

At LSE we performed together in two annual revues.

We met frequently in the Students' Union Common Room and I actually taught Bernard to play bridge, that I regularly played at lunchtime.

Subsequently, after joining a regular weekly bridge game organised by one of my LSE contacts, George Marlow (q.v.) I became friendly with Lionel Posner (q.v.) whose weekly poker game I also enjoyed.  Lionel was a first cousin of Bernard Levin, but confided that they were not particularly intimate, and he suspected that his cousin had "no time to spare for one of his [Lionel's] inferior intellect".  I have to confess that   subsequent attempts by me to contact Bernard Levin met a similar brick wall treatment.  My own hubris rejects any suggestion that it derived from the same cause as Lionel's.

But, to quote the department head that both Bernard Levin and I shared: "de mortuis nil nisi bunkum". (Harold Laski, q.v.)