A pleasure that I enjoy immeasurably is listening to good talks. Thanks to the magic of the internet, particularly YouTube, we have available an inexhaustible store of great content within easy reach. I would like to tell you about someone who is considered an intellectual giant: literary critic extraordinaire and professor of comparative literature, George Steiner.
I got to know about him around 2010 or so. He was one of the people featured in the Dutch TV documentary series, “Of Beauty and Consolation,” released in 2000. (It is available on YouTube.)
More recently I found a lot more of his talks on YouTube. But first, here’s an introduction to the man. I asked grok to do the needful.
George Steiner (1929–2020) was a French-American literary critic, essayist, philosopher, and translator, renowned for his profound and interdisciplinary approach to literature, culture, and language.
Born in Paris to Austrian Jewish parents, he fled Nazi persecution with his family, settling in the U.S. in 1940. A polyglot and polymath, Steiner was educated at Yale, Harvard, and Oxford, and his work reflects a deep engagement with Western literary and philosophical traditions.
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