George Steiner is one of the best-known literary critics in the English-speaking world today-perhaps because the term literary critic is a bit small for him. Like Susan Sontag, Steiner has followed a more public path. His essays are not hidden away in...

A polyglot intellectual who has published nonfiction on subjects as diverse as ancient Greek literature, the Russian novel, modernist poetry, aesthetics, philosophy, linguistics, chess, and translation, as well as several works of fiction and an...

In George Stenier's case, the first things to be said about him are at once the most obvious and, I think, the least important. You cannot avoid his colossal pomposity and egotism, which announce themselves in the title of this compendium, George Steiner:...

New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. 344 pp. $29.95. In Grammars of Creation, George Steiner delivers an eloquent eulogy on the death of art and meaning as they have been known in the West. Part meditation, part lament, the book suggests a...

For some years now, George Steiner has been writing books and essays that deal with vast cultural problems on the one hand and subtleties of literary texture on the other; After Babel is a very large, dense, insightful study that puts together in a new way the intellectual and stylistic emphases of Steiner's previous work. His device for fusing the philosophy of culture with fine technical analysis is to examine translation: its history, practice, theory, and its almost infinite ramifications. The bo...

[Steiner's themes in Language and Silence] are established in the first two sections, which fill nearly 200 pages and might really have been used, with a select sprinkling of the other items, to make a more tightly argued book. The problems set out there are important, often disturbing and largely neglected ones, and it is part of the author's unique merits as a critic that he keeps them always in the forefront of his mind. His concern is with language as the richest and closest expression of ...

If you are interested in contemporary literature and are looking for intelligent direction, then [Language and Silence, a] collection of George Steiner's essays and reviews, is the book for you. Steiner has been mostly known for his two dazzlingly precocious works of scholarship, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky and The Death of Tragedy, but he now emerges as a cultural journalist who is as pertinent as he is erudite, a kind of latter-day Arthur Koestler. Language and Silence casts a bright and searching light ...