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“... is scarcely a hardship or even a disruption of my routine. Himself no slouch when it came to work, George Steiner once asked a Soviet dissident how he got through so much. ‘House arrest, Steiner. House arrest.’ Alas, so far as work is concerned, I haven’t yet noticed much difference.The only medical scourge I’ve ...”

“... man of letters)’. He himself, for instance, is a learned specialist, a pro, whereas the likes of George Steiner and myself are ‘public critics’ (a.k.a. reviewers, vulgarisateurs), given to needless complaints about the ‘dehumanising’ technical language the professional is obliged to employ. Here one needs to distinguish blanket condemnations of ...”

“... anniversary of the Dresden fire-bombing. As also with the Holocaust. ‘Not our patch’ was how George Steiner caricatured British attitudes towards it only seven years ago. But now it has begun to haunt our patch. The Holocaust is now generally recognised as a specifically anti-semitic programme of industrialised extermination; the paradigm has ...”

“... and when they defer to or expatiate upon European theorists of translation like Walter Benjamin or George Steiner, it is easy to miss, as I think Christopher Reid did, the altogether un-European urgency of their concern. For them, translation, and the disputable possibility of it (at least as regards verse), is a matter neither academic nor narrowly ...”

“... case. Taped interviews with eight or so concerned onlookers (some of them, like Christopher Ricks, George Steiner and Gore Vidal, younger candidates for sagedom) are cut and rearranged to give a chronological sense of each career, but also a whiff of the blood and cordite of intellectual warfare. The purpose is not quite literary biography or ...”

“... light. They tend to be Aryans rather than half-wits. The most pertinent image here remains that of George Steiner, in the conclusion to The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H., his novella about Hitlerism. When the agents of Israeli retribution finally track down the Devil to his Amazonian lair, it is to find the verminous old git cackling hoarsely about the ...”

“... added many details of considerable interest, leading to a reassessment of the men involved. Though George Buchanan, the British ambassador at Petrograd, refused to intervene directly between Kerensky and Kornilov, local British military officers moved into the diplomatic void: Commander Locker-Lampson (the author has the details from the Commander’s ...”

“... Naughtie, Nigel Slater and David Hare, who claims that the best conjunction he’s seen so far is George Steiner talking to Joan Collins.Come away at eight o’clock with HMQ still at it, and the policemen in the forecourt very jolly and eating ice cream.1 June. John Horder dies at 92, who, after a succession of bad doctors at university and in New ...”

“... that has taken its poorer cousin in out of charity ... As for literature after reunification, George Steiner thought there could be none anyway after Hitler; but he had in mind the bureaucratic degeneration of the language. The question reactivates the matter of tradition, and of the framework in which the new text – any new text – is to be ...”

“... of body denial, or concur in her violently unfair hatred of Roman civilisation and the Jews’. George Steiner goes even further. He considers Weil ‘one of the ugliest cases of blindness and intolerance in the vexed history of Jewish self-hatred’. They have a point. She had an almost visceral loathing for ‘Hebrew’ and Roman culture, matched in ...”

“... and for display – essentially vulgar displays like the recent book and play on Hitler by George Steiner and Christopher Hampton. Only books of a very exceptional kind – Solzhenitsyn’s and the memoirs of Mandelstam’s widow – can confront the nature of the tyranny directly, and they do so, not by the poetic word, but by putting first-hand ...”

“... paragraphs, quoted in succession though they appear in the book in parallel: When the critic George Steiner looked through the entries for the Sunday Times Baudelaire translation competition he was judging in 1968, he was no doubt a little surprised. Someone had submitted more than thirty versions of the same poem. When the journalist Jürgen Serke ...”

“... prodigious oeuvre. But one constituency has remained more or less silent about Blunt: the academy. George Steiner’s searching New Yorker essay in 1980 provoked no particular response from art historians and theorists. The British Academy debated Blunt’s expulsion after his exposure, but despite rancorous arguments and the dramatic resignation of ...”

“... with dark laughter.‘Wherever you dip, there are “rich hours” and teasing depths,’ George Steiner wrote, as if The Book of Disquiet was a series of vignettes. But its power comes from its cumulative effect, the idea that this demented bookkeeper simply will not stop wondering what reality does not mean. Every time Soares appears to have ...”

“... and Dark Victory (1939), and it can’t be an accident that Jezebel too has music by Max Steiner, the master of Hollywood’s soupiest, most soothing sound. Now, Voyager is famous for Paul Henreid’s cigarette trick – he sticks two in his mouth, lights both, and gives one to Davis – and for her final line: ‘Oh, don’t let’s ask for the ...”