‘They treat me more like a devil than a god’

Lloyd Evans finds that Bernard-Henri Lévy is not the ageing French dandy of caricature but a serious intellectual with views on everything from Barack Obama to the Muslim veil

Oh goody. He’s late. Every journalist wants the interviewee to miss the appointment, if possible by several hours. It gives us the advantage and obliges our subject to apologise or face being lacerated in print for the transgression. French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy arrives 35 minutes after the agreed time and greets me with a disarming combination of lightly salted regret and a plausible excuse. In France, Lévy is so famous that he’s known by the simple acronym BHL, like a furniture superstore or a killer virus. He has an enormous personal fortune, a glamorous movie-star wife and a continent-hopping lifestyle and, at 60, he enjoys the sort of Beckhamesque levels of celebrity no British intellectual could hope for. Even in London, he’s a superstar, over here this time for a sold-out ‘Evening with Bernard-Henri Lévy’ hosted by Intelligence Squared.

So I was expecting someone flamboyant and faintly absurd, an ageing dandy with dyed hair and crumbling good looks and a shirt (the shirt is BHL’s sartorial trademark) ripped open to the waist to reveal a chest bronzed by the African sun at his Moroccan hideaway. Instead I’m shaking hands with a lean, middle-aged intellectual with a decent but not spectacular head of hair, dark energetic looks and a shirt which is indeed open but whose shy cleft reveals a very modest acreage of flesh. There’s one David Hasselhoff touch. He’s wearing sunglasses and we’re indoors, but he whips them off straightaway and sits opposite me with such an air of concentrated gravity that I feel faintly ashamed that I’d planned to open by asking if he really said, ‘God is dead but my hair is perfect.’