George Steiner has been called ‘the last European’. In 1924, his Jewish parents fled the growing anti-Semitic climate in Vienna and moved to Paris, where in 1929 George Steiner was born. In 1949 the family moved again, this time to New York. After having completed his language and literature studies at the University of Chicago, Steiner went back to Europe. What he then started to teach at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, can best be described as lessons in reading classical works, masterpieces that never lose their power of expression.

As a brilliant essayist with a rare erudition, he became world famous with books like Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. An Essay in the Old Criticism (1959), The Death of Tragedy (1961), Language and Silence (1967), In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes towards the Redefinition of Culture (1971), After Babel (1975), Real Presences (1986), No Passion Spent: Essays 1978-1995 (1996), his autobiography Errata (1998), Grammars of Creation (2001), Lessons of the Masters (2004) and Ten (Possible) Reasons for the Sadness of Thought (2005). In 2008 Steiner published My Unwritten Books, an original and highly personal reflection on seven imaginary books he never came to write, for several reasons.

George Steiner has published in many issues of Nexus. The text of his Nexus Lecture 2003 ‘The Idea of Europe’, has first been published in the Nexus Library series and was subsequently translated into almost all European languages. Steiner’s contribution to Nexus 50 and keynote lecture at the Nexus Conference 2008 are entitled ‘Tritones, the Three Languages of Man’.

---

Video : fragment from an interview with George Steiner, where he mentions his lecture 'A long night outside Troy' that he delivered at the Nexus Seminar in Venice in 2007.
Website: Contemporary Writers - George Steiner