Frank Kermode, who died on 17 August at the age of 90, was the author of many books, including Romantic Image (1957), The Sense of an Ending (1967) and Shakespeare’s Language (2000). He was the Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London and the King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge University. He inspired the founding of the London Review in 1979, and wrote more than 200 pieces for the paper.
RELATED ARTICLES
17 August 2006
23 February 2006
3 October 2002
10 May 2001
5 October 2000
2 March 2000
30 September 1999
RELATED CATEGORIES
Literature and literary criticism, Classics, Classical literature
Vol. 14 No. 11 · 11 June 1992
page 13 | 1703 words
Making a start
Frank Kermode
- Openings: Narrative Beginnings from the Epic to the Novel by A.D. Nuttall
Oxford, 264 pp, £30.00, April 1992, ISBN 0 19 811741 8
A.D. Nuttall is among the most erudite contemporary academic literary critics, at ease with the Classics, much given to philosophy. He is also disconcertingly bold and curious, and his latest book, like some of its predecessors, is as odd as it is learned. It begins, but by no means ends, with a minute enquiry into the expression in medias res. Horace observed that Homer, instead of starting his poem about the Trojan War from the beginning – ab ovo, Leda’s egg from which was hatched Helen of Troy – chose to rush his listeners ‘into the midst of things’, with a quarrel that occurred when the war had been going on for years.
Letters
Vol. 14 No. 14 · 23 July 1992
From Nigel Smith
In his review of A.D. Nuttall’s Openings (LRB, 11 June), Sir Frank Kermode mentions Nuttall’s reference to one Ebenezer Coppe (in fact, Nuttall simply has ‘Ranter Coppe’). As the discerning will know, the correct name is Abiezer Coppe.
Nigel Smith
Keble College, Oxford
From Nicolas Walter
Frank Kermode’s review of A.D. Nuttall’s Openings refers to ‘the Red King’s advice to Alice’. The advice to ‘begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end; then stop’ is given not by the Red King to Alice (in Through the Looking Glass) but by the King of Hearts to the White Rabbit (in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland).
Nicolas Walter
London N1
