He was a kind of nothing, titleless." This quotation from Coriolanus on the opening page of Not Entitled gives an inkling of the rueful irony and self-deprecating humour that pervade Frank Kermode's delightful memoir. For far from being titleless, Britain's grandest critic has been showered with honours - professorships, doctorates, fellowships galore - and knighted by the Queen for his services to English literature. "Is there a gene for luck?" he wonders. If so, he has been amply endowed. Yet at 75 his backward glance produces pangs of deep dissatisfaction and regret, tempered with amusement at life's absurdities.

Not Entitled is graced with the qualities we associate with Kermode's style - clarity, concision, fluency. Like a mountain stream it flows over varied ground; hilariously comic passages alternating with poetic descriptions and clever character analysis. There is little he has not read, but he carries his erudition lightly, seasoning narrative with literary allusion.

The book is a terrific read. Its first two sections cover his childhood, student days and the war years, while the third - which he calls "The Rest", quoting Verlaine's "Et tout le reste est litterature" - deals with the following 50 years.

The most moving and evocative part is his childhood. He was born and raised on the Isle of Man, a self-contained world where Britain was called "away" or "across". His family was poor and lived in a tenement, but was not unhappy - there was a supportive community. With a few deft brush-strokes the author brings to life a motley crowd of colourful, eccentric, droll neighbours and honorary "aunts" and "uncles".

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His honest, hard-working father and his warm, gay mother - who "loved the sound of words" - agreed that their son should not become a peasant. So they sent him to school at four, a year younger than other children. He was "fat and plain", "manually clumsy" and painfully shortsighted. At first he did not do well: his teacher thought he "was deliberately producing work beyond the reach of ordinary incompetence". Yet at ten he came first in the scholarship examination which later became the 11-plus.

His cleverness and clumsiness made him prey to bullies, in particular one older boy who beat him regularly and systematically, causing a nervous breakdown. Only when his shortsightedness was discovered and remedied did he begin to flourish. During the holidays he sold newspapers on ships sailing on the Irish sea, and contributed his earnings to the family purse.

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His first ambition was to become a "great philosopher". But one day in the local church he "had a word with God". As a result he decided to abandon his career as "an eye among the blind", and instead try to learn something "and to know how to say it with apparent clarity to others".

A second scholarship took him to the University of Liverpool - "below Oxbridge in pecking order" - because he could not afford the extra money needed for Oxford. University opened the door to a new world of concert halls and art galleries and cinemas and introduced him to middle-class life. He was invited to his friends' houses, where "emotions are held in check and conversation is about Middleton Murry and Kingsley Martin and his New Statesman". Then came the war.

At first Kermode registered as a conscientious objector, but withdrew his membership after the fall of France, realising that "the Germans would not be deterred by the methods of Bertrand Russell, or even Gandhi". He graduated in the summer of 1940.

The war years and Kermode's service in the Navy are recounted in the second part of the book: a hilarious mixture of muddle, incompetence and sheer absurdity, reminiscent of Dad's Army. He spends the first two years of the war off the coast of Iceland without seeing any action - just to prevent the Germans from establishing a submarine base there - under the command of a series of "mad captains", who invariably die or shoot themselves or burst with pink gin. They nearly sink their ships - only last-minute interventions by providence avert catastrophe. Kermode is treated by his fellow sailors kindly but dismissively, "as a sort of handicapped person".

He memorably describes the bleak landscape of Iceland, the gale-tortured seas, the "torments of Tartarus" - ennui, sexual privation, hangovers: "We just sat and grew older as lightless winter followed nightless summer and the gales swept down the funnel of the fjord I most of the army camp on the headland was lifted up and blown into the sea". For a while the arrival of the Americans in Reykjavik, with their culture of "buck and tail", their gaiety and jeepfuls of PX goods, relives the boredom, but soon gloom engulfs them all.

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He has his first experience of action when his ship sails to North Africa to prepare for the Allies' landing. Sailing towards Gibraltar he witnesses torpedoed vessels exploding all over the sea as myriad balls of fire burning on the water, while aircraft are shelled and fall like shooting stars. He is filled with pity at the waste of life, the destruction of humane values, the sheer stupidity of war.

Eventually he sails to Sydney, pending the assault on Japan. One day as he is swimming and pondering impending death, "the Bomb falls on Hiroshima", and it is over.

What to do next? His application for a job in the navy is turned down. No more successful are his attempts at poetry, fiction, playwriting. He attributes his inaptitude for creative literature to his general inability to "make anything work". "So there was nothing left for me except to become a critic, preferably with a paying job in a university." But once again his feeling of inadequacy gets in the way - "I was bad at interviews" - and he is rejected repeatedly.

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Eventually he lands a job at Reading University, thanks to an eccentric fellow, for whom "scholarship is almost an amusement". From Reading he "moves up'' to Manchester, Bristol, London, and finally Cambridge. The loftier the institution, the more riven by malice and envy, it seems, and Kermode is "not good at" departmental politics. But gradually he learns "to fight his corner" and win some battles with "hours of persistent lobbying before going into meetings".

The student unrest of 1968 is followed by the "French invasion" of the 1970s - structuralism, semiology, the nouveau roman. Later what he calls "theory" (deconstructionism?) becomes the dominant interest of the academic literary establishment, with the names of Foucault and Lacan, Derrida and Kristeva eclipsing that of Barthes, particularly in America: "The British rather held back, still regarding the Channel as a moat against infection." Meanwhile, Kermode's parallel career as literary journalist and editor (notably of Fontana Modern Masters), and as deputy editor of Encounter, flourishes apace.

Kermode's is a great success story, if not from rags to riches, certainly from obscurity to fame. Far from being "bad at things" it seems that everything he touches turns to gold. Yet a deep sadness pervades the "private weather" of his autobiography: "The story of a life must, insofar as it is truthful, be at least in part a story of loss and desertion inflicted and received". Though refreshingly discreet about his private life - it is condensed in a single paragraph - he mentions two failed marriages and that nowadays he lives alone and "sleeps diagonally". He is clearly lonely. One cannot help wondering how such a paragon of courtesy, modesty and humour could have been deserted. "I think that I am not the sort of person I should choose to know if I had any choice in the matter."

Methinks the professor protests too much.

Shusha Guppy is London editor, The Paris Review.