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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”