This is an extraordinary collection of essays by one of this country's most exciting and dramatic thinkers.The essays span a considerable time. But they turn on a central, compelling theme. What is meant by reading a serious text at a time when theories of language and literature question the very possibility of any agreed meaning, and at a time when new technologies seem likely to replace books as we have known them since Gutenberg. This question is brought to bear deliberately on the touchstone examples: the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare. Also on Kierkegaard and Kafka. The closely-meshed collection ends with a series of essays on the philosophic-theological underwriting of communication, with particular reference to what language tells us of Socrates and of Jesus. These essays by George Steiner, distinguished critic and Extraordinary Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, seek to conjoin the themes argued in such books asThe Death of Tragedy,Language and Silence,After Babel andReal Presences. They speak of a profound, if sometimes troubled, joy.

Born in Paris in 1929, George Steiner was educated in France, the USA and Britain. After a Rhodes Scholarship to Balliol, he joined the editorial staff ofThe Economist in 1952. In 1956 he was elected a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. There he wroteTolstoy or Dostoyevsky (1960) and beganThe Death of Tragedy (1961). In 1964 he publishedAnno Domini, a book of three novellas dealing with the aftermath of the Second World War.Language and Silence was published in 1967. His other work includesProofs and Three Parables, which Faber published in 1992.George Steiner lives in Cambridge, where he has been Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College since 1969. He has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur. He has been awarded the Commandeur dans l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 1994 he became the first Lord Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative Literature at Oxford.