Author(s): George Steiner

Philosophy | Snips

"Four impressive lectures about the culture of recent times (from the French Revolution) and the conceivable culture of times to come. Mr. Steiner's discussion of the break with the traditional literary past (Jewish, Christian, Greek, and Latin) is illuminating and attractively undogmatic. He writes as a man sharing ideas, and his original notions, though scarcely cheerful, have the bracing effect that first-rate thinking always has." -New Yorker
"In Bluebeard's Castle is a brief and brilliant book. An intellectual tour de force, it is also a book that should generate a profound excitement and promote a profound unease...like the great culturalists of the past. Steiner uses a dense and plural learning to assess his topic: his book has the outstanding quality of being not simply a reflection on culture, but an embodiment of certain contemporary resources within it. The result is one of the most important books I have read for a very long time."-New Society

Author Biography: Born in Paris in 1929, George Steiner was educated in France, the USA and Britain. After a Rhodes Scholarship to Balliol, he joined the editorial staff of The Economist in 1952. In 1956 he was elected a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. There he wrote Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky (1960) and began The Death of Tragedy (1961). In 1964 he published Anno Domini, a book of three novellas dealing with the aftermath of the Second World War. Language and Silence was published in 1967. His other work includes Proofs and Three Parables, which Faber published in 1992.George Steiner lives in Cambridge, where he has been Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College since 1969. He has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur. He has been awarded the Commandeur dans l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 1994 he became the first Lord Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative Literature at Oxford.