But he unleashed a tide that he could not stem. His own interpretations were always grounded in scholarship, rationality and tradition — that Warburg inheritance. He wrestled with the question of the limits of what we may reasonably say about a literary work. Does anything go? Can interpreters do what they like with texts? Kermode knew when to draw the line himself but was unable or unwilling to tell others that they must do so. His very tone and temperament, in both seminar and print, made him unwilling to take a stand. He was hospitable to all interesting lines of thought. He might raise an eyebrow or introduce a sceptical qualification, but he did not have a taste for confrontation. This tendency was consistent with his practice as editor of the Fontana Modern Masters, where he saw it as his role to keep all the balls in the air, to accord equal respect to such "masters" as Marcuse, Mailer, Marx and McLuhan.

They ordered these things differently in Cambridge. There was an English faculty where you were either in or out, one of us or one of them. F. R. Leavis had spent years as an insider representing himself as an outsider. George Steiner had failed to gain a position in the Faculty. Not long after ascending the King Edward VII Chair, Kermode found himself at the centre of the MacCabe Affair. A young don who was into Theory had lost out in the scramble for promotion from Assistant Lecturer to Lecturer. This should have been a purely domestic matter, but somehow it turned into a national news story about the Theory Wars, leading to the edifying spectacle of the Sun trying to explain a new kind of Deconstruction to readers more accustomed to ogling page three girls while wielding a wrecking ball on a building site.

Kermode became fed up with the whole thing, discovered that his wartime naval service counted towards his pension, and took early retirement. In the 30 years since, he has stood apart from the fray within the academy by pursuing the higher literary journalism in the pages of the New York Reviews of Books and its London counterpart. He has bequeathed his uncanny gift for unpicking the figure in the carpet of a book to a few followers, most notably James Wood of the New Yorker. But his considered, intricate mode of very literary criticism is a world away from the practice of English in most university departments in the 21st century.

The story of what has happened since Kermode's formal retirement in 1982 is a complicated one. In essence, the deconstructive turn decisively shifted the balance of power from author to reader. This made it possible for interpretation to begin not from the patient elucidation of the fine-grained texture of literary works but from the ideological predispositions of professional and often politically-motivated readers. Theory came before practice and works of literature came to be studied primarily as manifestations of extra-literary phenomena, most notably gender, race, class, sexuality and various kinds of imperialism. Musical patterns and Renaissance allusions in Forster were out. Forster and racism, Forster and "Queer Theory" were in.

One of the great merits of Sir Frank Kermode's criticism has always been its inscrutability. You cannot legitimately infer from it how he casts his vote in the privacy of the polling station. The most uncomfortable moment in his career was his discovery that Encounter magazine was being secretly funded by the CIA. He resigned from the editorial board. For Kermode, good criticism, like great literature, has always begun in disinterestedness. It should never be propaganda. He has many achievements to be proud of, and I am sure that like Piaf he regrets nothing, but does he ever wake in the night and wonder about his own role in the process whereby the profession of LitCrit came to believe that literature is not a place of its own, an autonomous second world, but merely the "site" for a series of familiar political struggles?