Swimming Against the Current

George Steiner, who died on Monday aged ninety, was our last link with Stefan Zweig’s ‘world of yesterday’, the world of European high culture and polysemic scholarship that the Germans destroyed after 1933. Steiner more than anyone else invented the academic disciplines now called Comparative Literature and ‘translation studies’. He achieved this not just against the flow of a history whose undertow nearly took him down as a child, but also against the fashions of an academy which did its best to ignore him even after he had forced it to acknowledge him.