Frank Kermode

From Handel to Strauss. Literary critic Frank Kermode’s shares his castaway choices with Sue Lawley.

One of the most influential teachers of his age, Frank is credited with bringing the new literary theory of Structuralism to this country. Something, as he admits to Sue Lawley, he now profoundly regrets.

He traces his life, "lived like tumbleweed in the wind", from a short-sighted, studious boy growing up on the Isle of Man to King Edward Professor of English Literature at Cambridge University.

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in September 1997.