“... in for the other thing he has to guard against, pirouetting and posturing in the public eye.’ Frank Kermode has been a bit un-English in giving the Auden of Epistle to a Godson the run of the OED playground, and he has accepted that the book ‘will hardly vex or bother anybody: it will give pleasure to all who have learned to take pleasure from his ...”

“... personnel towards the Soviet Union seems to have been generally neutral, and sometimes hostile. Frank Kermode recalled (in an LRB review of Martin Amis’s Koba the Dread) that he knew several intelligence officers who thought it would be no bad thing if the Russians were defeated while serving to wear down German military capability. Up until the ...”

“... to her fiction at all, its most obvious effect has usually been to fuel her spirit of enquiry (Frank Kermode once aptly referred to her novels as ‘researches’). The elaborate structure of Symposium now allows its author to explore, with a convert’s temerity, the very nature of omniscience, be it divine or authorial: of the several Catholic ...”

“... less) followed by two lines of five stressed syllables each.’ Far better judges than I, such as Frank Kermode and Stephen Spender, have admired these books; and Wystan Auden and Leonard Woolf are said to have spoken well of them. Certainly he saw himself as the heir to Virginia Woolf and his novels were written for those who enjoy the long conundrums ...”

“... existed? How should we live now if that is a real possibility?In The Sense of an Ending (1967), Frank Kermode argued that one of the things eschatologies of all kinds do is to provide people with narrative closure. We are uncomfortable, he suggested, with the idea that we are all of us mere players in the middle of history. Apocalypses and other ...”

“... the late Raj Chandavarkar, by Ian Jack. I ate canapés, searched for something to say to Frank Kermode, and had a glass of red wine. I generally feel neither one way nor another about drinking, but my listlessness about consuming alcohol offends only Indian acquaintances, not Western ones. However, in Oxford, imbibing the occasional port or wine ...”

“... Introducing​ his text of Hamlet in The Riverside Shakespeare, Frank Kermode calls it ‘the first great tragedy Europe had produced for two thousand years’, and adds, as if conceding to the long academic stress on its highly ‘problematic’ character: ‘how Shakespeare came to write it is, of course, a mystery on which it is useless to speculate ...”

“... gifted writers. Recognising its usefulness, some critics have tried to refine it further. Frank Kermode, for example, once suggested a distinction between different phases of Modernism, between ‘paleo-modernism’ and ‘neo-modernism’. But the suggestion never caught on, because for many people accuracy of description was not really the ...”

“... the end of the first paragraph of Heart of Darkness, the full oddity of which was pointed out by Frank Kermode. ‘Gleams of vanished spirits’ – no doubt the souls of all the sailormen haunting the Thames since the savage early days of Roman conquest – seemed acceptable Conradian language, in keeping with the tale’s general atmosphere, except ...”

“... because, like Robinson Crusoe, he’s fiction that’s become myth. ‘Fictions,’ according to Frank Kermode, ‘can degenerate into myths whenever they are not consciously held to be fictive.’ The fictiveness of Sherlock Holmes was uncertain from the start. The letters addressed to him sent to Conan Doyle for redirection, the landladies who wanted ...”

“... any scandal, allowing the writer to puff and genuflect and conceal his way to glory. Take Frank Kermode’s Not Entitled, a memoir typical of a generation of men who thought things were best said by not being said at all. Plante, however, is a throwback to the days of Barbara Skelton and the Comtesse de Boigne. In the years covered by his ...”

“... subjected to as a young man, describing the Vienna experiences as ‘an escape into reality’. Frank Kermode was listening and, much moved, wrote to Keller: ‘I filled out, with my own fears, the understatements of your talk. I suppose it must be that the school bully, the military sadist, and perhaps oneself in certain moments are, though ...”

“... political evil (Lymington). ‘Bourgeois? You can’t still use that term!’ On the contrary, Frank Kermode argued (in History and Value, 1988, advancing an approach developed more recently by Alison Light and Nicola Humble): the 1930s was ‘a brief period during which politics so polarised books and their writers – demanded so close an attention ...”

“... and the contrivances of the plots woven by the author and her characters. The aim, Spark told Frank Kermode, is to remind you that what you’re reading is ‘a pack of lies’ that might point to a mysterious truth; non-mysterious truths are to be treated with suspicion. Though that truth will be ‘Judaeo-Christian’ in content, John Updike got ...”

“... indefensible thought that The Unconsoled is the greatest novel written in English in my lifetime. Frank Kermode gives probably the best account of it – ‘the effect is of tragic farce, and Ishiguro, unlike his characters, works well in that destructive setting’ – in his reviews of Never Let Me Go and Nocturnes in the LRB.Unlike Ryder, Klara is not ...”