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Hello and welcome to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones, or as Frank Kermode once referred to me, the implausibly named Tom Jones. And today we're looking back

over the life and career, or careers of Frank Kermode,

a towering figure of 20th century literary criticism, prolific reviewer and broadcaster, memoirist,

and indirectly responsible for the founding of the London Review of Books.

Later in the podcast, we'll hear Mary Kay Wilmers, the editor of the LRB,

in conversation with Andrew Hagan talking about Kermode's relationship with the paper. We used to call him SSF, Sly's Sir Frank. But first I'm joined by Stefan Collini, Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature at Cambridge, and a frequent contributor to the LRB, if not quite as frequent

as Kermode himself was, though there aren't many who can match his total of 216 pieces for the paper.

Stefan Kallini has a piece in the current issue entitled Early Kermode, which explores the work

Kermode was doing in the 1950s in academia, journalism and broadcasting. Hello, Stefan. Thank you very much for joining me.

Hello, Tom. The sense of an ending, published in 1967, and still probably Kermode's most

famous book, consists of six lectures delivered at Brinmore College in 1965. The first lecture is

entitled in one of his typical dry jokes, The End.

So I thought we could perhaps follow that model and begin at the end with his immensely productive last years, or last decades rather, in Cambridge.

And he retired, if that's the word, to Cambridge in the mid-1980s, which I think is about the same time that you joined the English faculty there.

That's right, yes. Frank retired from his Cambridge chair in 1982 and went and taught for three years in Colombia in the States,

but he kept a house in Cambridge and then he moved back here and thereafter lived in Cambridge

...