Yearning for the ‘Utile’ 
Frank Kermode
John Carey, former Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford, an authority on Milton and Donne and Dickens and others, the very model of a Merton Professor, has also been, for decades, the chief reviewer of the Sunday Times, a BBC sage, a sought-after chairman of panels, a man well known for his strong opinions on all matters to do with literature and the other arts. These opinions he expresses with unusual force and directness; his manner, as his blurb says, is ‘important and provocative’, whether pronounced ex cathedra in Oxford or in allocutions to a wider public.
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Frank Kermode’s books include The Sense of an Ending and The Uses of Error.
Other articles by this contributor:
Writing about Shakespeare · Frank Kermode has his say
Nutmegged · The War against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 by Martin Amis.
Complicated Detours · Darwin’s Worms by Adam Phillips
Here she is · Zadie Smith
‘It’s the way people like us don’t talk’ · Andrew Motion’s Boyhood
Point of View · Atonement by Ian McEwan
Maximum Assistance from Good Cooking, Good Clothes, Good Drink · Auden’s Shakespeare
Nothing for Ever and Ever · Housman’s Pleasures
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