Steiner is a brilliant scholar of international renown. This is his swansong. A hugely important book which has had wonderful reviews: 'Wonderfully compelling ... these chapters also read as a mixture of fiction and scholarship' Independent 'Ardent for the joyfulness of learning. fierce for the personal significance of knowledge' THES 'Anyone familiar with the erudite George Steiner will know that anything he writes on literature, philosophy or culture is worth reading' Metro 'His failures, as he plummets from this dizzy height, are more grandly vertiginous than the modest successes of others' Peter Conrad, Observer 'The ability to acknowledge and describe greatness in others is one of Steiner's most attractive gifts' Peter Washington, Literary Review 'The fact that they have not been written is an unimportant oversight, a pardonable excess of modesty in such a joyful enterprise' Spectator 'This is all richly argued, meditative and yields intellectual nourishment and prompts admiration' Tribune

"has sections that stop the heart with their passion and eloquence" -- Boyd Tonkin INDEPENDENT "These essays reveal an inescapable humanity" GUARDIAN "bewitching; as personal as it is philosophical...thankfully, this is a touching, revealing, enlightening book that he did write" INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY "An important addition to his pubished works" BIG ISSUE IN THE NORTH 'An unusual and thought-provoking book that deals with repressed feelings, hang-ups and confusion.' GOOD BOOK GUIDE

Professor George Steiner is Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University and Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College at Cambridge University. His non-fiction includes Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, a critical analysis of the two great masters of the Russian novel, The Death of Tragedy, In Bluebeard's Castle, After Babel and No Passion Spent: Essays 1978-96. He is also the author of a number of works of fiction including Proofs and Three Parables and The Portage to San Cristobal of AH, which was adapted for the stage by Christopher Hampton. He has been a regular contributor of reviews and articles to journals and newspapers including the New Yorker, the Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian. He lives in Cambridge.