Short answers, pulled from the story.
Frank Kermode is best known for The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, published in 1967 by Oxford University Press, with a second edition in 2000. He was also widely known for his extensive book reviewing in the London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books, and for editing the Fontana Modern Masters series.
Frank Kermode was born on the 29th of November 1919 on the Isle of Man and grew up in Douglas. He was the only son of a delivery truck driver and a former waitress, and he described his family as being of "extremely modest means."
Kermode resigned from Encounter within two years of becoming co-editor in 1965, once it became clear the magazine was funded by the CIA. He had been a contributor to the literary and political publication for several years before taking the co-editorship.
Kermode held the Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature chair at University College London from 1967 to 1974, and the King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge University from 1974 to 1982. He also held the Julian Clarence Levi Professorship in the Humanities at Columbia University and the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard University.
Frank Kermode died in Cambridge on the 17th of August 2010. A few months before his death, the scholar James Shapiro described him as "the best living reader of Shakespeare anywhere, hands down."
In September 1996, boxes of valuable books and manuscripts belonging to Kermode were removed and destroyed by Cambridge City Council refuse collectors, who took them instead of the professional movers hired to relocate the items. Kermode sued Cambridge City Council for £20,000; the Council denied responsibility.