In conversation at a recent literary do with two eminent Oxbridge professors of Eng Lit, past and present, I felt moved for some reason to drop the name of Frank Kermode. ‘Ah,’ said one of the profs, ‘writing a memoir, I gather.’ ‘Really?’ mused the other. ‘A memoir?’ The word was held in the air between thumbnail and index finger, then dropped on the passing canapé tray like a used cocktail-stick.

Well, yes, Sir Frank has indeed stepped out from the deep cover behind which literary critics tend to lurk, and boldly poked his head above the academic parapet with an account of some episodes from a seventy-six-year life lived to the hilt and still (to the enrichment of us all) going strong. A memoir is precisely what this book is, as opposed to memoirs plural – a judicious selection, that is, of episodes he chooses to remember, sparing us those he would apparently rather forget. No great claims are made, no scores settled, not even many names dropped. Kermode chooses to write – in a milky, measured prose oozing the wisdom of a long, full lifetime – of his childhood in the Isle of Man, of his wartime Navy larks and, at equal length, but with somewhat less enthusiasm, of his subsequent life as a university teacher who became one of the most distinguished literary gurus of his time.

This casual emphasis is really more his than mine, as the central motif of this book (reflected in its title) is a gently avuncular astonishment that life has treated Kermode so well, that he has done so little to deserve it, and that he has never really felt too much at home in this world. His last page hymns a statue of a naked nymph at the bottom of’ his Cambridge garden, a gift from friends to mark his seventy-fifth birthday, which has conferred on him – apparently for the first time in his life – a sense of belonging. All this carries an unexpected, ruminative, at times mildly depressive air from a man who has known remarkable success in his field, not to mention among the leading figures of his day, and the pleasure of finding his later years showered with honours.

From ths heady cliff top Kermode looks back to his childhood on the Isle of Man with a seasoned yearning, if not quite nostalgia, which wrings from him some of the most moving passages in the book. It was from his mother’s smattering of half-dead Manx dialect that he evidently (for he never quite spells ths out) learnt his love of words and the feel for language which has distinguished his work quite as much as hls celebrated nose for narrative style and structure. In Kermode’s hands, a boyhood vignette beginning with a girl and ending with an orange becomes a quasi-religious experience told with a universality worthy of William (and/or Henry) James. Like so many moments in this book, which begin in apparent frivolity and slow-burn their way towards profound insight, it is also intensely moving.

‘Not entitled’ was the phrase used in Kermode’s Navy when the disciplinary fines accrued by his rogues’ gallery of Keystone Cop shipmates outdistanced their weekly pay packet. It becomes his chosen title less as a pun on his knighthood for services to literature than his pervasive unease about his place in the world. By what absurd quirk of fate, for instance, did his role in Hitler’s downfall consist of maritime defence work off the coast of Iceland? There is as much logic in this, he implies, as in his subsequent progress from the University of Liverpool via Reading and Durham to ever grander professorships at Manchester, Bristol, London and Cambridge.

It is with a slightly weary sense of obligation, still candid and self-deprecating, that he tackles certain episodes too celebrated to avoid: the furore over CIA funding for Encounter (of which he was co-editor), the post-structurahst wars which proved distasteful enough to drive him from his Cambridge chair, the supreme seat available to those of his calling. Not for Kermode the relish of many of his colleagues for academic politics, always a distraction from his real work and so little to do with a consuming love of literature. There are fleeting cameo appearances by friends and contemporaries, from Leavis to Alvarez, but in-depth portraits only of a quirkily chosen few. He draws an equally bashful veil over his two long-lived but broken marriages, and indeed the rest of his supposedly mundane private life. Holding hard to an agenda of his own idiosyncratic choosing, he contrives in his wisdom to wring highly affecting insights from moments private as much as public, without giving away anything he adjudges inappropriate to share.

But Kermode is a writer and thinker of such erudition, taste and bonhomie that he could, for all I care, be wringing his own particular blend of wit and wisdom from a magisterial analysis of the Yellow Pages. Very few, if any, other books published this year, or indeed any other year, will carry the same sharp but generous insights into the human condition as this quiet ramble round the borders of his own life. It is a privileged glimpse into a finely tuned mind which has had more exercise than most, conveyed in a prose worthy of many of the subjects of his more familiar critical style.

As he continues to share with us hs elegant pensées on other writers, we must hope that Kermode will also continue to meditate upon hmself. Playing snooker in his London club a couple of years ago with the newly entitled Sir Frank, I asked him about his encounters with T S Eliot. There followed a stream of characteristically judicious anecdotes and observations, which duly put him off his stroke (as, with a fiver at stake, was my intent), but are nowhere to be found in this book. Kermode fans demand a sequel.