“... book not only as an exploration of ancient history, but as a work that speaks to the present. As Frank Kermode put it in The Sense of an Ending, people are born in medias res and ‘also die in mediis rebus, and to make sense of their span they need fictive concords with origins and ends, such as give meaning to lives and to poems’. I was once asked ...”

“... of our Paris office’ and into the open as case officers and apparatchiks. (I had this first from Frank Kermode, and Wreszin amplifies the story admirably.) Still, Macdonald declined to see what was in front of his nose, and waited years to write the garrulously satiric piece for Esquire in which he ‘confessed’ to having been a CIA cultural agent all ...”

“... beneath the CD player. A revolving bookcase on loan from the college library held more books (Frank Kermode, Norbert Elias, the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics) and had more papers stacked on top of it. Once there had been a bed in the inner room, but it had been used as a place to store books for so long that in the end the ...”

“... set out in a densely written ‘Prologue’ bristling with structuralist terminology. Frank Kermode, who admires the book, points out in his foreword that Anglo-Saxon readers are likely to find this introductory section difficult, and its manner unfamiliar. The warning is fair. Nevertheless, like Evans’s theory of ‘discrepant ...”

“... of the Universe’), who ‘liked beginnings and endings’ and perhaps has read Edward Said and Frank Kermode. And in this He is also in the image of His maker, for Malamud’s book has its own academic accoutrements, including a Preface which (like that of any learned monograph) acknowledges the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences for ...”

“... the constitutive power of time’. By 1981, in his defence of theory against some strictures by Frank Kermode, though he might feign a prophetic tremor at the thought of a coming wave of repression, the climate had actually shifted so far in de Man’s favour that many in the audience would have been reading the writers he read, and would be equipped ...”

“... but that the few English critics who bother with theory are tourists: mid-Atlantic figures like Frank Kermode and Tony Tanner, or Francophiles like Stephen Heath and Stephen Bann. Samuel Johnson had moral principles, but nothing like a theory of literature: he didn’t need one. The force of English common sense is that it leaves you free to deal with ...”

“... Age … The fog lifts, the world sees us as we are and, worse still, we see ourselves as we are.’Frank Kermode, discussing Henry Green, understood the impact of fog as ‘sensory failure … an interruption in the conventional processing of information, in our knowing dully, for the sake of convenience, where and what we are.’ That’s exactly ...”

“... on the sweetness of spring – and aims to steal and blasphemously deface the works he pilfers. Frank Kermode calls that seminal poem a work of ‘decreation’, and the figure that Eliot aspires to be is that of decreator. The poet is not now – is no more – godlike, but is instead a vandal, a criminal, an annihilator of all that’s made to a ...”

“... Maurier certainly has some eminent detractors. The highly distinguished literary critic, Professor Frank Kermode, for example, finds precious little to admire in Du Maurier’s writing.’ Perhaps Pick wants to protect us (and himself) from the blandishments of the book. One can’t be fastidious enough with this novel. ‘If the laboured pathos of the ...”

“... Wordsworth, a poet superbly ensconced in ‘the dread watch-tower of man’s absolute self’. As Frank Kermode argued in Romantic Image (1957), it is really not so large a step from the solitary tower of the Wordsworthian ego to the lonely tower of high aestheticism; and while it would never have crossed Coleridge’s mind to say with Mallarmé that the ...”

“... Anthology had seen off the rival Oxford Anthology, produced by heavyweight academics including Frank Kermode and Harold Bloom, and the deep histories of English and British culture were being re-scripted. A revised edition of the Norton Anthology commissioned a translation of Beowulf from Heaney, and David Damrosch’s Longman Anthology of British ...”

“... and having much in common with the easy, unshowy critical penetration of Watt’s contemporary Frank Kermode. But, as his intellectual trajectory suggests, considerable scholarly resources stood surety for this agreeable surface manner. As Watt reflected, his aim had been ‘to transcend what I had learned from the idealist modes of German thought by ...”

“... not to find himself mentioned, nevertheless recognised something ‘truly masterly’; and Frank Kermode wrote that Ellmann’s account would ‘fix Joyce’s image for a generation’, a judgment that, as Zachary Leader rightly comments, was if anything an underestimate. Leader, himself the distinguished biographer of Kingsley Amis and Saul ...”

“... they can clean up Western civilisation by treating the canon as if it were a water pistol. As Frank Kermode argues in a brilliant chapter on the subject in History and Value, canons are indeed ‘complicit with power’. However, since the institution of literature could conceivably exist without a canon, those who attack only the latter – the ...”