Joseph Epstein (who is not OGIC) on George Steiner:
In the world of intellectual journalism, George Steiner has
always been a figure of controversy. No one who reads him seems to be
neutral about him, with opinion divided between those who think his range
of learning and power of dramatizing ideas astonishingly brilliant, and
those who think him a fake of astounding portentousness and pomposity.
Judgments about him are made even more complicated by the fact that he has
been the victim of English academic anti-Semitism, colder and more
disdainful than which civilized Jew-hating does not get.
Steiner is a writer who has always come on high, toweringly
high. His first book, “Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky” (1959), set the tone for
his unremitting highbrowism. For many years he moved the heavy mental
lumber for the New Yorker, reviewing works on Walter Benjamin, Franz
Kafka, and Paul C