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“... the recently dead) – a dash of Christopher Hitchens for pungent contrarianism, a sprinkling of George Steiner for intransigent cultural pessimism, a garnish of Tom Nairn for caustic Scottish sarcasm – but the result might still fall well short of the original. The critic as preacher needs a more earnest and more settled moral sensibility to appeal ...”

“... well as he’d hoped. It seems that he was British: he had a ‘BBC accent’ and liked to quote George Steiner, his former teacher, on eros’s role in the classroom. But for decades he lived in Brooklyn, turning into the kind of man who understands the attraction of the idea that ‘no truly good book would find more than three thousand readers.’ He ...”

“... life took the shape of playwright. ‘I want to be an artist or nothing,’ he wrote in 1914 to George Pierce Baker, applying to Baker’s famous Harvard playwriting course (tuition was paid for by the Bank of Dad). James O’Neill (c. 1880). The grandiosity of O’Neill’s plan nonetheless broadcast his Oedipal rebellion. ‘My soul is a ...”

“... I’d already underlined many of passages I quote here. In my diary there are lines copied from George Steiner (‘the nation-state bristling with arms is a bitter relic, an absurdity in the century of crowded men’) and Abba Eban (‘It is about time that we stand on our own feet and not on those of the six million dead’). Most of these annotations ...”

“... first British self-service launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949.’4 January. George F. tells me that when Andrew Lloyd Webber, the Lord Lloyd Webber, as we must now say, bought his Canaletto at Christie’s he paid the £10 million bill by Access in order to earn the air miles – enough presumably to last him till the end of his ...”

“... at issue. In literary and philosophical discussions of the Holocaust it is often assumed that (as George Steiner put it) ‘each of us has been diminished by the enactment of a potential subhumanity latent in all of us.’ This belief inevitably leads to the question: if this is man, what does it mean to be human? If the Holocaust is unique, that ...”

“... readers. Great claims have been made for the importance of his work – in English most notably by George Steiner and Erich Heller – but he is known, if at all in England, as an influential contemporary of Wittgenstein and Freud, and as a writer of aphorisms. Auden, for example, in his Faber anthology has 24 entries by Kraus. So Harry Zohn’s Selected ...”

“... of both these books. The Damned and the Elect, first published in Germany in 1976 (and, as George Steiner notes in a Foreword, with no reference to recent German history), is about the power and promotion of exemplary stories; the way certain sequences of events are used as virtually autonomous guides inside us, as dreams from which there is no ...”

“... that lies beyond what we can see. This is not a philosophy of ‘as if’. (In direct contrast, George Steiner, who contributes an Introduction to this book, has a literary metaphysics – his Real Presence doctrine – that seems to be merely metaphorical, but which borrows a non-metaphorical religious language.) This transcendent reality, in ...”

“... hands for £1 as a profitable investment. The social worker who took him to hospital deserves the George Medal, but he’s more likely to be dismissed by Mrs Bottomley as just another ancillary worker bleeding (sic) the Health Service dry.18 July. Lord (ex-Chief Rabbi) Jakobovits is in favour of genetic engineering to rid the world of homosexuality. I wonder ...”

“... notion of revolution but the idea of counter-revolution too. Their case is ably surveyed here by George Steiner: ‘The attempts to institute on earth “kingdoms of justice”, to legislate the messianic in secular terms, go not only against the grain of human nature ... they go against the grain of divine providence. It is in the first and last nature ...”

“... separate lines and kinds of study, like a work of the Renaissance. Like a play of that time, as George Steiner pointed out, is the swift development in Dostoevsky of themes which sweep us on to further excitements and possibilities before they themselves have been used up or made clear. The French structuralist critic René Girard has a good metaphor ...”

“... Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, films like The Night Porter, and in the writings of Hannah Arendt, George Steiner, Bruno Bettelheim and a host of others. But on the subject of the nuclear holocaust there is a deafening silence. It is as if, somehow, the entire topic had been declared out of bounds, as if it were ‘unthinkable’. Such a state of affairs ...”

“... or Louis Hartz attributing American liberalism to the absence of feudalism in the United States or George Steiner hearing the ‘hoofbeats’ of Napoleon’s armies in Hegel’s Phenomenology (‘the master statement of the new density of being’), Marxism pressed intellectuals of varying stripes to think about history’s wayward intrusions. Even ...”

“... We have one more thing: the most nerve-straining title of all and the one discussed long ago by George Steiner in his Trotsky and the Tragic Imagination. Isaac Deutscher, the non-Jewish Jew par excellence, hesitated in calling his Trotsky trilogy The Prophet. There are messianic traditions after all, and there are messianic traditions. Yet surely ...”