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“... dutifully spoke for the defence at the Lady Chatterley trial while feeling that it was a bad book. Frank Kermode, writing of what he approvingly termed ‘decreative’ Modernist poets in a 1966 essay on T.S. Eliot, suggested that one way of recognising them ‘is by a certain ambiguity in your own response. The Waste Land, and also Hugh Selwyn ...”

“... the quest of her final book.) What other things made up Fitzgerald’s ‘burden’? Well, Frank Kermode was right early on, in this paper (22 November 1979), when he noticed the fascination with water, in its many forms and depredations: damp, flood, rain, drowning, ‘the dead man’s stench of river water’, the ‘long-awaited ...”

“... instances the boy in the shirt in the garden of Gethsemane (Mark 14:51-2), discussed at length by Frank Kermode in The Genesis of Secrecy, and the man Joseph meets in a field at Shechem while he is searching for his brothers (Genesis 37:12-18). These characters should not be seen as interpolations, or as survivals of some earlier and more coherent ...”

“... Asked in 1933 what his favourite among his own poems was, Wallace Stevens said he liked best ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream’, from Harmonium (1923). The work ‘wears a deliberately commonplace costume’, Stevens said, ‘and yet seems to me to contain something of the essential gaudiness of poetry’. He didn’t remember much about writing the poem except ‘the state of mind from which it came’: ‘I dislike niggling, and like letting myself go ...”

“... past decades have not, strictly speaking, either claimed to be English or cared to be thought so. Frank Kermode, Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton are proud of their Manx, Welsh and Irish roots. As a result, each one’s journey from the periphery to the centre, from the working-class outskirts of English culture to its middle and upper-class ...”

“... hers, against theirs. He draws a difficult distinction between myths and fictions, rather as Frank Kermode did in The Sense of an Ending. A myth you act out, a fiction you believe in knowing it to be a fiction. Kermode liked to quote Wallace Stevens, the aphoristic Stevens of Opus Posthumous, and Rushdie’s Rai ...”

“... I have mentioned are large partly because they are packed with specialised knowledge. Pynchon, as Frank Kermode pointed out recently, ‘has an enormous amount of expert information – for instance, about technology, history and sexual subversion’. So does Eco about theology and theosophy, literature, philosophy, mechanical engineering, computers ...”

“... was turning against him. The critics and reviewers now making their reputations ‘were men like Frank Kermode and Christopher Ricks, who were academics primarily’ – and who as a class, we may add, would in an earlier generation have been confining themselves to the conservative tasks of textual scholarship within environments remote from even the ...”

“... critics of Lawrence have seen their task as something similar: a matter of showing him, as Frank Kermode put it, ‘taming metaphysic by fiction’. Part of Lawrence would have approved of this approach. He thought that all novelists of consequence (‘even Balzac’) had ‘a didactic purpose, otherwise a philosophy’, and that this was ...”

“... other than alive. The trick was to distinguish appealing and enabling myths from noxious ones. Frank Kermode, in The Sense of an Ending, written before Kermode came across Barthes, I think, but nevertheless a book that seems to have Barthes in mind, to be waiting for him, thought an attention to the difference ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... had a single, all-encompassing theme, one very much of its time: the coercive force of language. Frank Kermode wrote of him in 1975: ‘language, as game or disease, dominates the entire enterprise.’ At the outset of his best-known play, Kaspar, Handke tells the reader ‘the play might also be called “Speech Torture”.’ The figure of a ...”

“... is peculiarly American, but it is probably no accident that it has flourished so prodigally there. Frank Kermode once wrote that reading a certain poem by Wallace Stevens made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end, a statement it would be as hard to imagine issuing from the lips of a young American professor in pursuit of tenure as it would be ...”

“... the book warns, ‘may kill us yet’. The distinction between fiction and myth is discussed by Frank Kermode in The Sense of an Ending. Roughly speaking, myths are fictions that have forgotten their own fictional status and taken themselves as real. Liberals like Brooks fear being imprisoned by their own convictions, or oppressed by the convictions of ...”

“... 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 ...”