Frank Kermode died yesterday. He was the most erudite man I’ve ever known, and the best company. He had a lovely sense of humour and a smile that — literally — seemed to twinkle. He first came into my life as a distant presence — as General Editor of the Fontana Modern Masters series, ideal material for an autodidact like me. It was only in the 1990s that I got to know him in person, for it turned out that we had a good friend in common.

From that time onwards, I have nothing but nice memories: of calling on him in his comfortable, elegant, book-lined Pinehurst flat on my way home, and being entertained therein with strong liquor, cigars and gossip; of the way he always came to greet one as the lift door opened onto his landing; of his annual declaration that this year’s new book would be his last; of his willingness to come to lunch or dinner at insanely short notice; of being his guest at great and small occasions in his college (King’s); of his culinary diffidence; of serving as one of his informal IT-support people (the other was my friend Quentin) in his early days on email (he was an early Mac user); of his wonderfully ironic detachment about the vicissitudes of academic politics; and of the paradoxical way he combined supreme self-confidence in his own judgement with a bemused amusement at his elevated status in society.

This paradox was beautifully captured in the title of his autobiography — Not Entitled, of which my inscribed copy is a treasured possession. Frank felt that he was always, somehow, an outsider. One evening I was his guest at a lavish feast in King’s — the one where they put out the College’s amazing collection of silver and gold plate. Around us at the table were seated various examples of Establishment and academic worthiness and success. Frank was wearing the medal that came with his Knighthood, and was being treated by other guests with the deference that his eminence warranted. “Surely”, I said to him, “you must have got over that feeling of non-entitlement by now?” He shook his head. “It’s not something you get over”, he replied.

LATER: Quentin has some nice memories too, including this:

I remember his surprised embarrassment when I discovered, after dismantling his computer, that the reason he could no longer push a CD into the CD-drive was that on some distant past occasion he had pushed a 5.25″ floppy disk into the same slot.

I remember discussing Tolkien with him after seeing the first Lord of the Rings film, and he said that W.H. Auden had once asked him, “Don’t you think Tolkien is a wonderful writer?” To which he replied that no, he didn’t really think so. “I respect you for saying that”, said Auden, “but I’ll never trust your opinion again.”

Alan MacFarlane has done a wonderful extended interview with Frank which seems to me to capture exactly everything that was special about him.

From a comment on BoingBoing’s piece criticising Chris Anderson’s “Is the web really dead?” meme. Of interest to me because one of the chapter-headings of my upcoming book is “The Net is not the Web”. I’ve had lots of comments from colleagues along the lines of “Surely nobody confuses the two”. Well, they do; and the more politically influential they are, the more they are likely to blur the distinction.

My friend Nicci has a lovely blog post with this title. It begins:

Every summer we travel to Sweden. Luckily, we go by ferry and car – luckily, because then we can take as many books as we want. And we take lots of them, dozens and dozens: books we know we’re going to read and books we think we're going to read and books we might possibly read or dip into and a few reference books, who knows why?, and some poetry books so we can learn poetry by heart, and then there are the books we want other people to read because we love them so much and the just-in-case books which we are pretty certain we won't have time to read, but what if a day suddenly has more hours in it, or if we break a leg and spend all our time lying in bed…. In fact, I blame it on Sean [Sean French, her husband and co-author of the Nicci French books]: usually only six or so of the books are my choice, and the rest are his. He is tremendously ambitious: he always takes several classics that are hundreds of densely-typed pages long. I remember that the first holiday we ever went on together was a walking week in the Provence, and he carried the new, heavy (unopened) translation of War and Peace in his rucksack, from hotel to hotel.

As it happens, the weight of books was much on my mind when we were heading for Provence this year. As usual, we agonised about whether this would be the year that we drove down to the South of France rather than enduring the indignities of RyanAir, but in the end decided that we had to fly because of various external deadlines and exigencies. Which meant that we were immediately faced with the fierce weight restrictions — 10 kg — imposed on cabin baggage by the world’s least-favourite but most-used airline.

Believe me, 10 kg doesn’t leave much leeway if you have to take a serious camera and a laptop, so I spent the week before we left avoiding bookshops. But one recently-published volume really intrigued me — Peter Mandelson’s memoirs. The problem was: it was big and heavy.

In the end, I hit on a solution: I have an iPod Touch for which there’s a Kindle App, so I bought the eBook version of the book from the Amazon Kindle store. This was a first for me, in that although I use eBooks a lot (I always carry an electronic copy of Ulysses with me, for example), they’re DRM-free, and in general I’m pretty hostile to the intellectual-property regimes implicit in the eBook business. But I thought that, in this particular case, the experiment was worth trying.

Mandelson’s memoirs are a revelation. Firstly, they’re surprisingly readable. Most politicians can’t write (which was one of the reasons Obama’s memoir came as such a lovely surprise). But Mandelson’s memoirs have an engaging, candid style in which he comes over as an interesting and rather engaging man: a political obsessive, of course, but an intriguing character — the kind who would make an excellent dinner-guest. The book also suggests a more sensitive and insecure person than his public carapace might indicate — which reminded me of a general principle that all journalists should have engraved on their hearts: whenever you encounter a media stereotype, it’s likely to be completely misleading.

Secondly, although — like all political memoirs — they are self-serving to a degree, my conclusion is the same as that reached by my former Observer colleague, Robert Harris, namely that Mandelson was very shabbily treated by Blair and Campbell. But the most striking thing of all is the picture that emerges of Gordon Brown as an emotionally crippled, obsessive, almost psychotic personality. People have always said that Brown should never have been Prime Minister. I’ve come away from Mandelson’s book thinking that he should never have been Chancellor either. All of which makes the final act of the story — in which the Brown who has for a decade been attacking and undermining Mandelson begs him to come back to help out — truly extraordinary.

The Kindle App is very neat btw. Once you buy a book, it becomes available on any Apple iDevice that you happen to own. And if you’re on a WiFi network, it checks to see if you’ve been reading the book on another device and, if you have, whether you want to jump to where you left off on the other machine.

When talking to Bill Thompson about this last Saturday, he made an interesting point, namely that the reading experience provided by the Kindle App is better than that provided by the actual Kindle device marketed by Amazon. The reason? With the device, you turn the page by pressing a button, whereas on the App you just stroke the page — so, as Bill put it, “you engage with the text and not with the device”. Not possessing a Kindle, I can’t attest to this, but it’s an intriguing thought.

This is lovely.

A security researcher said on Thursday he was the first to crack the code embedded in the seal of the U.S. Cyber Command (Cybercom), the group responsible for protecting the country’s military networks from attack.

Sean-Paul Correll, a threat researcher with antivirus vendor Panda Security, said that the characters visible in a gold ring on Cybercom’s official seal represent the MD5 hash of the group’s mission statement.* MD5 is a 128-bit cryptographic hash most often used to verify file integrity.

A representative of Cybercom confirmed that Correll had it right. “Mr. Correll is correct…it’s a MD5 hash,” said Lt. Commander Steve Curry of the U.S. Navy, in an e-mail.

* Footnote: According to Wikipedia, the aforementioned ‘mission’ statement reads: “USCYBERCOM plans, coordinates, integrates, synchronizes and conducts activities to: direct the operations and defense of specified Department of Defense information networks and; prepare to, and when directed, conduct full spectrum military cyberspace operations in order to enable actions in all domains, ensure US/Allied freedom of action in cyberspace and deny the same to our adversaries.”

“Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London”, said Samuel Johnson. “No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”

Much the same might be said about the Web. Here, for example, is a brief list of remarkable things I encountered on it today.

Liquidator by Neal Ascherson. Also in the LRB. Lovely review of Adam Sisman’s biography of Hugh Trevor-Roper. Having earlier read (and been repelled by) T-R’s Letters from Oxford, I had assumed I could give the biography a miss. But Ascherson’s extensive and balanced review makes me want to revise that decision. Sigh: no rest for the wicked.

And it’s not even the weekend yet.