Professor Sir Frank Kermode

 Over the past half-century Frank Kermode has established himself as one of the finest literary critics of his generation. When he delivered the Clark Lectures at Cambridge in 2007, he chose as his subject E.M. Forster - eighty years after Forster gave the same series of lectures, which became his ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL. Kermode's lectures form the core of this book: he assesses the influence and meaning of all of Forster's novels as well as his criticism, reflects on his profound musicality (Britten thought Forster the most musical of all writers) and offers a fascinating interpretation of his greatest work, A PASSAGE TO INDIA. The second part of the book takes the form of a causerie, a brilliant and wide-ranging series of loosely organized, interweaving discussions in which Forster is reduced in size, placed in the wider context of his times, and occasionally scolded by Kermode for being not quite the author he would have preferred him to be. Kermode reflects not only on Forster's considerable talent but on the social and personal circumstances that restricted it, on the dizzying changes in English society in the first half of the twentieth century, and the preoccupations and uncertainties of those, like Forster, who found themselves caught between two worlds. Taking Forster as his starting point, Kermode also casts a spotlight on many of his great contemporary writers - Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Arnold Bennett, D.H. Lawrence and H.G. Wells. The product of a lifetime's reading and thinking by one of our most distinguished critics, CONCERNING E.M. FORSTER is both a stimulating and original portrait of E.M. Forster and a unique panorama of twentieth-century English letters.

"This is a lovely book on a novelist Kermode has lived with and thought about for many decades; a readable and valuable product of what we would be wise to call Kermode’s late middle period." Telegraph

"Like all good criticism, Concerning EM Forster makes one want to read the books under discussion once more, and it ends on an appropriately affectionate note. " Sunday Times

A short book about Shakespeare and his times.

`The business of explanation - of elucidation and comparison - has to go on for as long as art goes on, for not being able to speak for itself it always needs someone else to speak for it, about it. The clearer and more lucid the commentary, the better for art’.

Frank Kermode is now widely regarded as Britain’s most distinguished literary critic. Unlike other recent collections of his work, which have confined themselves to particular decades, Pieces of My Mind surveys the whole of his career. It includes, in his own selection, those passages most representative of his earlier books - The Sense of An Ending, The Classic, The Genesis of Secrecy, Forms of Attention - which are themselves now classics, as well as the best of his more occasional criticism.

Among other things, Pieces of My Mind contains more on Shakespeare, the subject of his best-selling book Shakespeare’s Language, and what he calls ‘my best tribute’ to Wallace Stevens, the poet who more than any other hovers over the whole of his work. Kermode’s originality, penetration and elegance, here displayed at their most engaging, show why his writing has attracted such admiration. But the book does not confine itself to literary criticism, history and theory; it also contains pieces about dance, painting, the Bible and opera, and three previously unpublished pieces, on ‘Memory’, ‘Forgetting’ and ‘The Cambridge Connection’. Pieces of My Mind magnificently reminds us why criticism is important, and it shows us, when done clearly and lucidly, how enjoyable it can be.

Frank Kermode is often regarded as the leading literary critic now writing in English; his recent book Shakespeare's Language, which became a bestseller in both Britain and America, was a reminder of the originality and humanity - and good sense - of his criticism.

Kermode himself said that much of his best work has been done at shorter length, in the essays he has written on a very wide range of subjects for literary journals of one kind or another. Pleasing Myself brings the best of these pieces from the last decade, on topics as diverse as Donne, Yeats, Howard Hodgkin, gnosticism, the sea and money, as well as further thoughts on Shakespeare. Each of them is concise and entertaining, and has something original or pithy to say about its subject. They will bring as much pleasure to their readers as Kermode unashamedly admits to writing of them brought to the author.

The true biography of Shakespeare - and only one we really need to care about - is in the plays, and the plays are made of language. This book argues that something extraordinary happened to the language of Shakespeare in mid-career, somewhere around 1600. An initial discussion of the language of some of the earlier plays looks for signs as to what was afoot, and this leads to a central testament of this turning point. The rest of the book is about what came after that, in the great works between "Hamlet" and "The Tempest".