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“... Frank Kermode’s new book contains a great deal of graceful and dignified prose, especially in the last chapter, and many of the examples are of great interest. It seems to argue that no history or biography can be believed, but must be regarded as a kind of novel. Any narrative is necessarily incomplete, and the details left out may for some readers be the important ones – what is taken for granted may become the crucial question ...”

“... Segre’s Storia di un Ebreo Fortunato, Memoirs of a Fortunate Jew, has complex resonances. If, as Frank Kermode has recently remarked in this paper, memoirs and confessions are still to some extent separate genres, then it may be said that a conviction of his own good fortune is the distinguishing mark of the memoirist. The memoirs of famous ...”

“... orange but safely married. (When I spoke to him, I discovered he could flirt with his eyes shut.) Frank Kermode, a great friend to this paper but never knowingly unmalicious, remarked that ‘Stephen never knew where he was going but he always knew the quickest way to get there.’ To me, it seems perfectly natural to forego the gay life if you don’t ...”

“... the campaign which led up to the fall of Singapore. In his brief and telling introduction Frank Kermode puts his finger on the way Piper constructed the young man and his provenance in order to bring out his mode of thinking and reacting. He comes from a background no doubt very similar to Piper’s own. It is one that crops up frequently in this ...”

“... in the quoted material, it also produces rewarding debates. ‘The rising literary critic’ Frank Kermode discusses in Encounter Williams’s Culture and Society, which Kynaston extols, while appearing to grant Kermode’s limiting judgment: Kermode admired the book’s ...”

“... argument becomes too obvious for comfort. The formation and function of canons was the subject of Frank Kermode’s Wellek Library lectures, now published as Forms of Attention. The third and concluding lecture is called ‘Disentangling Knowledge from Opinion’. Kermode’s elegant traditionalism allows him to ...”

“... a pattern for Crace’s career, it’s perhaps William Golding. The suggestion isn’t new: Frank Kermode proposed it on the basis of a shared imaginative intensity, an ‘almost fanatical concentration on a particular time and a particular object’. Kermode, reviewing Crace’s Quarantine, cited The Spire, but ...”

“... was in part a reaction against modernist attempts to make the novel closed and total. In 1965, Frank Kermode, writing as a participant observer, referred to the ‘growing literature’ on the relationship between ‘form and freedom’. Interventions came from two writers with a background in philosophy: Michel Butor, who portrayed the novel as a ...”

“... done his remarks can be shot through with frantic hilarity:Karl: Madeleine, will you get me Frank Kermode on the telephone.Madeleine (after trying): He’s not there.Karl: How do you know he’s not there? May be he just didn’t pick the phone upOnce when the phone rang at a particularly critical juncture, Karl yelled: ‘If it’s Oliver ...”

“... can be thus summarily wished away in the interests of an uncluttered critical praxis. Frank Kermode’s Essays on Fiction are likewise preoccupied with the relationship between criticism and its broader institutional context. That he construes the relationship in very different terms is a measure of its deep ambivalence as regards the ...”

“... postscript set in Norwich. At a staid University Teachers of English get-together George Steiner, Frank Kermode and Seamus Heaney do their party pieces and a novelist – the author of Doctor Criminale, we must suppose – reads from his upcoming work, ‘whose ending he seems not to know’. The publisher’s blurb laconically informs us that Bradbury ...”

“... and adventure’ were absent. Being funny is not part of the reputation of either of them. But Frank Kermode went so far as to call Diana the writer ‘among other things, a comedian’, and we can ask how many ardent anti-communists would say about Trotsky, as Diana did: ‘He was such an intellectual … he wrote such good prose; and he made fun of ...”

“... for me, in my innocence, to read them. One must acknowledge, however, that Richard Cobb is not Frank Kermode, nor Angus Wilson D.P. Walker. I had come knowing what Britain’s preconceived ideas were: her pragmatism and refusal of abstraction, her solitary traditions and diehard taste for erudition and travail honnête, however ...”

“... Apart from help from Spender’s family and friends, we are told that the typescript was read by Frank Kermode, Stuart Hampshire, Richard Wollheim and Karl Miller, a formidable jury who, at the very least, seem likely to have ensured that a satisfactory account of the Encounter imbroglio would be given. Faced with such difficulties and such good ...”

“... of the United States of America’ – does he repeat himself? Very well, he repeats himself.As Frank Kermode once said, literary canons ‘negate the distinction between knowledge and opinion’. They make beliefs about what we should know into what we do actually know. That is why they are both necessary and dangerous. They are necessary because you ...”