Mr. Kermode also wrote for the general book-reading audience, chiefly in The London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books, and his judgments were typically measured but pointed, whether reviewing Philip Roth, John Updike or Zadie Smith. His pungent take on Updike’s series of “Bech” novels managed at once to express a certain awe at the writer’s talents while discounting the books in question, calling them “works of the left hand.”  Yet despite the variety of his work, he almost invariably tied what he wrote to a recurring central concern of his: what the English literary critic Lawrence S. Rainey, writing in the London newspaper The Independent, described as “the conflict between the human need to make sense of the world through storytelling and our propensity to seek meaning in details (linguistic, symbolic, anecdotal) that are indifferent, even hostile, to story.”  For instance, in his best-known book, “The Sense of an Ending,” Mr. Kermode analyzed the fictions we invent to bring meaning and order to a world that often seems chaotic and hurtling toward catastrophe. Between the tick and the tock of the clock, as he put it, we want a connection as well as the suggestion of an arrow shooting eschatologically toward some final judgment.  Yet, as he pointed out in “The Genesis of Secrecy,” narratives, just like life, can include details that defy interpretation, like the Man in the Mackintosh who keeps showing up in Joyce’s “Ulysses” or the young man who runs away naked when Jesus is arrested at Gethsemane in the Gospel according to Mark.  Mr. Kermode’s critics sometimes faulted him for a deliberately difficult style and what Mr. Lodge called “intellectual dandyism.” Although in “The Art of Telling” Mr. Kermode suggested that innovative French approaches to literary criticism like structuralism and deconstructionism might eventually find at least some place in the mainstream, he took to task some of the more radical attempts to subvert traditional texts through gender or racial perspectives. In “An Appetite for Poetry” (Harvard, 1989) he reaffirmed his belief in the value of reading literary classics as a way of gauging both ideals of permanence and the forces of change.  The view of him as uppermost an establishmentarian was only reinforced in 1974, when he attained what is considered the pre-eminent post in English literary criticism: the King Edward VII chair of English literature at King’s College, Cambridge University, an appointment made by the crown at the suggestion of the prime minister. In 1991 he was knighted.  But even his occasional detractors respected him for his brilliance, his evenhandedness and his humaneness. The critic Richard Poirier, reviewing “Puzzles and Epiphanies” (Chilmark, 1962) for The New York Review of Books, praised Mr. Kermode’s criticism for its freedom from “polemical or theoretical limitations” and for possessing “the power, which Arnold required of good criticism, ‘to ascertain the master-spirit in the literature of an epoch.’ ”  John Frank Kermode was born on Nov. 29, 1919, in Douglas, Isle of Man, the only son of John Pritchard Kermode, a storeroom keeper who earned three pounds a week, and the former Doris Kennedy, a farm girl who had been a waitress and who had given her son his unwanted “habit of deference” and had inspired his love of words, as he wrote in his memoir “Not Entitled” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995).  He transcended his unpromising background beyond all expectations, winning scholarships to the local high school and to Liverpool University, from which he graduated in 1940. He learned to read Greek and Latin as well as French, Italian and German, and he went on to become a professor of Renaissance and modern English literature.  Yet as a child he was a disappointment to his father, “being fat, plain, shortsighted, clumsy, idle, dirty,” as he wrote in “Not Entitled,” “and very unlikely to add to the family store of sporting cups and medals.”  He devoted a full third of that book to the six years he spent in the Royal Navy, much of it in Iceland, after graduating from Liverpool, rising to the rank of lieutenant. But he chose not to write about his two marriages, the first to Maureen Eccles, from 1947 to 1970, the second to Anita Van Vactor; or his two children, Mark and Deborah, both of whom survive him. Nor did he mention his knighthood.  He wrote modestly, perhaps ruefully, of his career prospects, concluding that his incapacity “at least to be able to surmise how very complicated things are done” — or “even simple ones” — prevented him from becoming a playwright or novelist.  “It was also emerging that my poetry wasn’t up to much,” he added, “so there was nothing left for me except to become a critic, preferably with a paying job in a university.”  That career took him to a series of teaching posts in English and American universities and eventually to his appointment in 1967 as Lord Northcliffe professor of modern English literature at University College London, where he was credited with helping to introduce contemporary French critical theory to Britain.  Before taking that post, he also served as co-editor (with Melvin J. Lasky) of the prestigious magazine Encounter, where he succeeded Stephen Spender in 1964. But he resigned in 1966 on learning that the magazine, sponsored by the Congress of Cultural Freedom, had received money from the Central Intelligence Agency.  From London he went on, seven years later, to his prestigious chair at Cambridge, leaving in 1982, in part because of an unsuccessful tenure battle on behalf of the structuralist-oriented film and literary scholar Colin MacCabe, then a junior lecturer.  He then moved to the United States and taught for the next few years at several universities. He was for many years the Julian Clarence Levi professor emeritus in the humanities at Columbia.  His writing, though, reached beyond academia. His “Shakespeare’s Language” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000) — which traced the development of the playwright through the evolution of his poetry and concluded that “Hamlet” signified a major turning point — was a best seller in England.  At the time he worried about the book’s accessibility, telling an interviewer for The Irish Times: “What I do is despised by some younger critics, who want everything to sound extremely technical. I spent a long time developing an intelligible style. But these critics despise people who don’t use unintelligible jargon.”  Perhaps there was a touch of sarcasm in the comment, a bit of grumbling. But he clearly had little patience for critics who seemed to write only for other critics. As he wrote in “Pieces of My Mind: Essays and Criticism 1958-2002” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003), criticism “can be quite humbly and sometimes even quite magnificently useful.” But it must also “give pleasure,” he added, “like the other arts.”  A version of this article appears in print on August 19, 2010, on Page A25 of the New York edition with the headline: Frank Kermode, 90, A Critic Who Wrote With Style, Is Dead. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Mr. Kermode was a professor at English and American universities who wrote or edited more than 50 books and who was knighted for his work.