George Steiner obituary

Polymath devoted to an ideal of literacy as private reading and to exploring the relationship between the Holocaust and civilisationGeorge Steiner, who has died aged 90, was a polymathic European intellectual of particular severity. In an academic career that took him from the University of Chicago to Harvard, Oxford, Princeton, Cambridge and Geneva, Steiner held forth on tragedy, reading, the decline of literacy, the possibilities of translation, science and chess. He crossed swords with Noam C