A sane cuckoo in the nest of art

This is a hugely impressive but somewhat exhausting book, the justification for which — from a brutally commercial viewpoint — I fail to grasp. It is a collection of Sir Frank Kermode’s literary criticism, selected by the author and drawn chronologically from all periods and aspects of his oeuvre. Short prefaces, outlining genesis and context, precede 19 essays (some of them lectures, some of them chapters from full-length works), followed by seven briefer articles, taken from the London Review of Books.