A much wider public has grown curious about the work of a scholar long esteemed within the academy. Pieces of My Mind responds to that interest.Kermode has selected the best of his work during “40 years in the wilderness of criticism”, as he terms it. The wilderness encompasses an astonishing variety of subjects, all of them scrutinised with unflagging intelligence and grace.Despite this variety, Kermode has often returned to a central problem: the conflict between the human need to make sense of the world through storytelling, and our propensity to seek meaning in details (linguistic, symbolic, anecdotal) that are indifferent, even hostile, to story. In reading, as in life, we are riven by a desire for connectedness and closure, and a countervailing fascination with the unruly and disturbing detail that demands interpretation.What should we make of Theoclymenos, who mysteriously appears and reappears in the Odyssey? Exactly who is that “boy in the shirt” who turns up at the dramatic moment of Jesus’s arrest in the Gospel of Mark? And why do we labour to make sense of them, to reduce fortuity and the appearance of randomness?Kermode believes that “we are programmed to prefer fulfilment to disappointment, the closed to the open.” Perhaps Kermode retains an impish preference for openness.

Hefty titles for someone “not entitled”.
It has been routine to characterise Kermode as “a master critic” or “the greatest literary scholar of his generation”. But it was only recently, with Shakespeare’s Language, that he became a bestselling author. In his illustrious career, Kermode has been Lord Northcliffe Professor of English at University College London, King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge, and Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard, not to mention having become “Sir Frank” in 1991. How that changes his perception of the audience reaction to Sexie is difficult to estimate, but it must inevitably do that.What I heard and felt of Sexie was the contented giggling of foreplay peppered with raunchy, climactic belly-laughs.

Even though the ripples of laughter amounted to a gentle caress rather than an amorous fondle, people were wearing smiles from the beginning to the end It is safe to say that Eddie was reigning in Manchester Touring to 23 December. When Frank Kermode published his autobiography seven years ago, he called it Not Entitled, a title textured with multiple ironies. Some of his surreal non sequiturs veer and sway before a leitmotif such as breasts, flies or horses comes to the rescue; improvisations can go on too long; and, as if to test the theory that he can do no wrong, his encore is a Christopher Walken impersonation.Because of the size of the venue, Izzard has to have the laughter played back to him via monitors, a process that sometimes takes more than a second. Indulgence requires patience, and, as Izzard’s material often works in layers of ideas piled on top of one another rather than presented as faits accomplis, that patience is useful But there is a price to pay. His trademark vagueness has allowed Izzard to become the perfect stadium stand-up: he does not have to befriend the audience or engage it in small talk to make it feel at home, yet here is a man that you could happily listen to all night, someone who can turn a gathering in an aircraft hangar into an intimate soir?Though unashamedly and justifiably promoted as the most rock’n'roll comedy tour to date, Sexie begins its life as a cinema trailer, with big screens displaying swirling graphics and a soundtrack of fanfares and crescendos.