Submitted by Scott Lahti, Jan 20, 2008 22:55

His compulsions, at once polyglot and polymathic, took root from the cradle. The Austro-Judaic patrimony of his apprenticeship, exiled to Paris as night gathered. Lycée inscribed a Titanic humanism, steeped to ripeness in the Belle Epoque of his feuilleton heyday across the Sunday supplements, and the Third Programme of the BBC. His provocations as speculative, pipedrawn Kulturkritiker were legion: he rushed in where Anglosphere tout read. Amid a dozen guest lectureships and as many honorary degrees, he defied physics itself via the opposed strains of a hypertrophied Teutonic heaviness on the one hand - and the dirigible weightlessness of one capable of boundless self-inflation on the other: Oh, the Germanity! Strapping an entire Alexandrine library atop his back, he teased out the self-propulsive telos lurking but for him otherwise undiscerned amid two millennia of Western culture. Robert Alter called him "theological". Edward Said saw in his channeling the Platonic essence of his authorial subjects a higher "ventriloquism". Amid descent unto a brilliantine preciosity beyond parody that found Whaggish pompleteers pronouncing him long past his sell-by date, he endured. As Oxford classicist Oswyn Murray, reviewing him for the TLS in 1984, assessed him for all time: No contemporary critic can leap higher - or fall flatter.

George Steiner is back, braving the storm-winds of self-parody whence all but he had fled.

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