Critic Philosopher George Steiner, 92

He was what many people call a human encyclopedia—not in the Americansense, a blank vault of facts, but in the French Enlightenment one: acritical repository of significant knowledge. His long book reviews forthis magazine, written over thirty years, from 1966 to 1997, were dottedwith allusions of the kind that a naturally horizontal thinker couldn’thelp but include. But they were never imposed or forced—his mind truly,on its way to Borges, passed through Sophocles and stopped