Bernard-Henri Lévy (born November 5, 1948 in Beni-Saf, Algeria) is a French philosopher and writer.

Dashing, articulate, media savvy and blessed with a glamorous actress wife, Arielle Dombasle, he is nonetheless frequently lampooned as the archetypal pretentious Left Bank intellectual. Often referred to simply as BHL, he won early recognition in France as a social critic, an advocate of ethics and justice, and a flamboyant maverick.

Lévy is also a pre-eminent journalist, having started his career as a war reporter for Combat, the famous underground newspaper founded by Camus during the Nazi occupation of France. Lévy covered the war between Pakistan and India over Bangladesh.

Returning to Paris, he became famous as the young founder of the New Philosophers (Nouveaux Philosophes) school. This was a group disenchanted with communist and socialist responses to the near revolutionary upheavals in France of May 1968, who articulated a fierce and uncompromising moral critique of Marxist and socialist dogmas years prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union. In contrast to the neo-conservatism of ex-leftist anti-Marxist American intellectuals, however, neither Lévy nor the New Philosophers embraced capitalist ideology on the rebound.

In 1977, at the age of 28 he published Barbarism with a Human Face (La barbarie a visage humain), arguing that Marxism was inherently corrupt. Some hailed him as the new Camus, but others dismissed his writing as slick marketing.

Other books include Le testament de Dieu, L'ideologie française, Les derniers jours de Charles Baudelaire, Mondrian and the play Le Jugement dernier. He is a member of the Selection Committee of the Editions Grasset, and he runs the La règle du Jeu magazine. He writes weekly a column in the magazine Point and chairs the Conseil de Surveillance of La Sept-Arte.

Levy was one of the first French intellectuals to call for intervention in Bosnia in the 1990s, and spoke out early about Serbian concentration camps. In 2003, he wrote a compelling account of his efforts to track the murderers of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who had been executed by Islamic extremists the previous year. At the time of Pearl’s death, Lévy was visiting Afghanistan as French President Jacques Chirac's special envoy. He spent the next year in Pakistan, India, Europe and the United States trying to uncover why Pearl's captors held and executed him. The resulting book, Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, argues it was because Pearl knew too much about the links between Pakistan's secret service, nuclear scientists and al-Qaeda. The book won widespread praise, not least for Lévy's courage in investigating the affair in one of the world’s most dangerous regions.

Despite his lofty ideals, he is, with his third wife, actress Arielle Dombasle, regular fixture in Paris Match magazine, wearing his trademark unbuttoned white shirts and designer suits. Lévy's reputation for narcissism is legend. One article about him coined the dictum, "God is dead but my hair is perfect". He once said that the discovery of a new shade of grey left him "ecstatic". He is a regular victim of cream pie flinger Noël Godin, who describes Lévy as a vain, pontificating dandy. In 1997, Lévy directed Dombasle in his first feature film, Le jour et la nuit: she starred opposite Alain Delon, who played a writer clearly based on Lévy himself.

Lévy’s lavish lifestyle is made possible by the inheritance of a fortune from his late father's lumber business. Said to be worth some Euro 150 million, he has a luxury apartment in Saint-Germain, a hideaway on the Cote d'Azur and two large properties in Morocco.

Books in English

• Bernard-Henri Lévy, Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, Melville House Publishing (http://www.melvillehousebooks.com/), September 2003, hardcover, 454 pages, ISBN 0971865949
• Bernard-Henri Levy, translated by Andrew Brown, Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century, Polity Press (http://www.polity.co.uk/default.htm), July 2003, hardcover, 456 pages, ISBN 074563009X
• Edited by Bernard-Henry Lévy, What Good Are Intellectuals: 44 Writers Share Their Thoughts, Algora Publishing (http://www.algora.com/), 2000, paperback, 276 pages, ISBN 1892941104
• Bernard Henri Lévy, Richard Veasey, Adventures on the Freedom Road Harvill Press (an imprint of Random House) (http://www.randomhouse.co.uk/harvill/), 1995, hardcover, ISBN 1860460356fr:Bernard-Henri Lévy