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“... Bunting, Charles Tomlinson, Ted Hughes, Robert Graves, Hugh MacDiarmid, J.M. Synge, David Jones, George Steiner, Geoffrey Hill, Elizabeth Daryush and the fraternity of poets anthologised by Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville in A Various Art. It also includes a number of Davie’s poems. If we were to read the adjective ‘British’ in the subtitle of ...”

“... dissertation on the fear of being buried alive, and four 19th-century Danish followers of Hegel? George Steiner’s erudition is as exuberant as ever. The latest book, like its predecessors, teems with esoteric references, recondite allusions and jackdaw juxtapositions. It resounds with the clangour of dropping names. The learning this time plays over ...”

“... Proofs’, the longest story here, looks to be George Steiner’s farewell tribute on the passing of Communism; hardly a tribute, but rather more magnanimous than the run of postmortems and obituaries elicited by the event. The main character, an Italian somewhat old-fashionedly referred to as the Professore, is a convinced long-time Communist, by métier a fanatical proof-reader ...”

“... by our civilisation’s continued, compulsive preoccupation with his personality – which a George Steiner even undertook to reinvent: his The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. has been reviewed in these pages, nor are Norman Stone, James J. Barnes and Patience P. Barnes always less fanciful. And if Hitler’s personality remains an unanswered ...”

“... expect people to remember exactly what you said, or the details of your message’). Cost is George Steiner dedicating his anthology of poetry translations, Poem to Poem, to his mother, ‘who spoke six languages, in her own fashion’. It is the inability to manage with what Costa calls ‘orderly mixing’, a lightly mocking and blissfully ...”

“... at best a minor or compromised one. It seems that the idea for this book came from a passage in George Steiner’s study of language and translation, After Babel – itself an intellectual adventure in the grand old conquistadorial manner. Steiner deplored the fact that, whereas a good many literary creators have ...”

“... In 1968, the Sunday Times ran a competition to translate Baudelaire’s sonnet ‘Spleen’, with George Steiner as judge. Steiner found himself receiving ‘fantastically mottoed’ envelopes from a variety of increasingly improbable authors and sources, all in the same green ink: W.H. Laudanum, Kenelme Sexnoth ...”

“... as a senior academic, teacher and writer. Writing about Carter’s biography in the TLS, George Steiner says that Blunt ‘risked or courted exposure at almost every point; sexual, political and, it may be, in one or two instances, professional’. This is unconvincing. Everyone who knew anything about Blunt knew that he was ...”

“... outside the main territory currently mined by her Arabic-language contemporaries. Some years ago George Steiner perceptively characterised the linguistic homelessness and adaptability of refugee writers (Nabokov, Beckett etc) as creating ‘poets unhoused and wanderers across language ... eccentric, aloof, nostalgic’. Soueif’s work, modest in ...”

“... and there seems an insatiable market for new versions, especially in English. According to George Steiner, in his Introduction to Homer in English, this particular ‘translation act ... surpasses in frequency that of any other act of transfer into any other Western tongue and literature’, including versions of the Bible. But how do you begin to ...”

“... writing documentary novels disguised as biography. You would – well, I would – think that George Steiner must be a model of scholarly rigour. When I read his essay ‘Trotsky and the Tragic Imagination’ in Language and Silence, I felt my pulse speed up at his remark about Lenin and Trotsky: ‘the relationship between these two elemental ...”

“... that ‘Oedipus’ de-oculation concedes violability in the face of external impingements.’ For George Steiner, one reason for the supposed death of tragedy in the modern era is the fact that the two ideologies which shaped the period most deeply, Marxism and Christianity, are both anti-tragic doctrines. But this is to define tragedy as a narrative ...”

“... of art they encounter – particularly the feelings they feel they ought not to have. She quotes George Steiner, that ‘most mandarin of critics’, on Edith Piaf’s ‘Je Ne Regrette Rien’:‘The text is infantile, the tune stentorious, and the politics which enlisted the song unattractive,’ Steiner begins ...”

“... descended from the flies and straightened out his life would have been quite hard to guess. It was George Steiner, his teacher at Cambridge. Geoffrey told him that he was going to marry a girl called Priscilla.       ‘Well,’ he said, ‘don’t underestimate the difficulties.’       ‘What difficulties?’       ‘Of a Jew ...”

“... winds up with a postscript set in Norwich. At a staid University Teachers of English get-together George Steiner, Frank Kermode and Seamus Heaney do their party pieces and a novelist – the author of Doctor Criminale, we must suppose – reads from his upcoming work, ‘whose ending he seems not to know’. The publisher’s blurb laconically informs us ...”