A Manxman who many believed to be Britain's foremost literary critic has died.

Professor Sir Frank Kermode passed away in Cambridge on Tuesday.

He was 90.

Howard Caine reports (text, below, from attached audio file):

Frank Kermode was born in Douglas in 1919 and educated at Douglas High School, before obtaining a place at the University of Liverpool.

During the war he served in the Navy, then returned to Liverpool to take up a postgraduate scholarship.

He went on to become an eminent writer, scholar and academic, taking a professorial chair at Cambridge in 1974.

He also worked in America where, in 1977, he was Charles Eliot Norton professor of poetry at Harvard.

In his retirement Sir Frank continued to lecture in the UK and US, publishing his now standard text on Shakespeare in 2000 and his last book, Concerning EM Forster, in 2009.

He was knighted in 1991.

Sir Frank never came back to the Island to teach, as his parents had hoped, saying 'I had to choose exile'.