I can’t see,” Sir Frank Kermode is quoted as saying on the back cover of The Gatekeeper, “how this book could fail to amuse.” In that case I will have to tell him. It can fail because, despite containing many genuinely funny, and some touching, moments, its lack of amiability becomes ultimately distasteful. Terry Eagleton’s progress from a poor working-class childhood in the north of England to a chair of English at Oxford is an admirable achievement, but the chip has never been dislodged from his shoulder. As a boy he was gatekeeper to a convent of Carmelite nuns, and the symbol of privileged access to an enclosed world governs the book; when Cambridge offers him an undergraduate place, the roles are reversed and “the gatekeeper had let me in.” Did membership of the elite give him a bad conscience? To the inevitable question, how a supposed radical could contentedly occupy an Oxford professorship for so long, he gives no answer. Instead he offers unwitting proof of his own observation that “Oxbridge colleges … have an infantilizing effect on their longer-term inmates, reducing them to a state of querulous narcissism.” Catholic by birth, Marxist by conversion, he has abandoned formal profession of both faiths as too idealistic. “What governs our lives for the most part,” he pronounces, “is the given, the habitual, the sheer inertia of history, circumstance, inheritance.” Yet the fatalism is uneasy, just as the attempts at “wit” in the manner of his hero, Oscar Wilde, are