“... so intensely expressive at times and so terrifyingly deadened at others. When the film came out, Frank Kermode wrote in the LRB (6 January 2005) that ‘to give Pacino his due, he plays [Shylock] as a human being, increasingly vicious as his wrongs accumulate, totally lacking the sentiment of mercy, but always true to his culture and its eloquent ...”

“... preceding it with a significance it might not otherwise possess is given its fullest expression in Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending. In this, perhaps his most influential book, Kermode argued that fiction, like apocalypse, gives shape to time by translating the relentless tick-tick-tick of bare chronicity into ...”

“... his appalled ‘non-fiction’ book about Stalin and Communism, reviewed in the LRB by Frank Kermode under the rubric ‘Amis’s Terrible News’. For the novelisation, his sources – a narrow range – aren’t so much embellished as systematised, artfully reshuffled and newly dealt. In Koba the Dread Amis, following Solzhenitsyn, wrote ...”

“... whom Carey wrote an admiring biography) memorably called ‘the ordinary universe’.Still, as Frank Kermode observed in his review of Original Copy (LRB, 12 November 1987), ‘plain men cannot write plain prose in the manner of Orwell or Carey: to do it you must be over-educated.’ It is not difficult to twig that Orwell’s anti-intellectualism has ...”

“... from A.J. Ayer to Fiona Pitt-Kethley. We often used to argue about Pitt-Kethley’s super-sexually frank work in the office. Karl was a believer and said something very useful about her work: ‘When people are shocked by something,’ he told me, ‘they never admit to being shocked by it, they say the poem doesn’t scan.’People’s values aren’t ...”

“... at the time, seemed to be located disproportionately among grand recusant families and big houses: Frank Kermode observed that ‘the operation of divine grace seems to be confined to those who say “chimney-piece”.’ Waugh wasn’t troubled by accusations of snobbery, claiming the right ‘to deal with the kind of people I know best’, but that ...”

“... critique of Camus was the first title in the Fontana Modern Masters series, edited by Frank Kermode. Many of Camus’s pieces for Alger républicain are collected in the Pléiade Oeuvres complètes: Tome I (2006). Others can be found in Cahiers Albert Camus, 3: Fragments d’un combat 1938-1940, edited by André Abbou and Jacqueline ...”

“... in power, did not please Allott, who dissented from the view expressed by both Robert Conquest and Frank Kermode that Gunn’s early poems hinted at ‘the prospect of a major poet’. Allott had two reasons: one was ‘the element of romantic immaturity that lies behind what is apparently at present Mr Gunn’s favourite poetic stance’, the other was ...”

“... flight. Wise man; or perhaps merely a canny ape.Huxley’s last novel, Island (1962), is, as Frank Kermode has said, ‘one of the worst novels ever written’. Few have bothered to disagree. Inferior as the book is, the informed reader catches a glimpse of Trev for the last time, in articulo mortis. The narrative opens with the hero, Will ...”

“... approach to playing and interpretation. Brendel’s status in this respect is well conveyed by Frank Kermode, writing in the London Review of Books around the time that Bernhard published Der Untergeher:When Op. 111 came to an end amid great enthusiasm ... it was obvious that it had become the real right thing to catch this series. During the interval ...”

“... Kept me there under the Prevention of Terrorism. I had to explain it was a joke.We had dinner with Frank McGuinness and then went to Buswell’s Hotel for a drink. We found it full of urban twentysomethings in miniskirts and earrings. The Polish guy behind the desk was lacking in enthusiasm when it came to guests and room keys. ‘He was like some dark-faced ...”

“... may die, but sheer professional interest mercifully remains. I thought of Bagshaw when reading Frank Kermode’s lively little book History and Value, and I thought of him again while enjoying Richard Cobb’s Something to hold onto, whose title would itself have been greeted with fellow-feeling by Bagshaw. Anthony Powell’s character is fascinated ...”

“... exquisite art, he cannot fight the will of his wife or reverse the destruction she wreaks. Frank Kermode saw the tale as allegorical, ‘the life of art versus the life of evangelical conscience ending in the sacrifice of life’.James had heard from Edmund Gosse about the unsatisfactory marriage of John Addington Symonds, about Symonds’s ...”

“... on Roth’s work when it was hot off the grill – by, among others, Alfred Kazin, Marvin Mudrick, Frank Kermode, Leslie A. Fiedler, Stanley Crouch and Vivian Gornick (how she has been vindicated! Her 1976 Village Voice essay on Roth and company, ‘Why Do These Men Hate Women?,’ was a warning siren) – that fresh illuminations would be tough to ...”

“... CIA involvement in its finances, another idea came up. Some of those figures like Stephen Spender, Frank Kermode and Stuart Hampshire wanted to start a counter-magazine.I don’t think ‘Encounter’ had folded by then.No, it hadn’t but Spender had left. Spender was a big figure in the CIA controversy. So the projected magazine would be a ...”