Book description
'This book is important-and portentous-for if it is true that
tragedy is dead, we face a vital cultural loss. . . . The book is
bound to start controversy. . . . The very passion and insight with
which he writes about the tragedies that have moved him prove that the
vision still lives and that words can still enlighten and reveal.' R.
B. Sewall, New York Times Book Review
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 Légion 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.
