Steiner, George 1929–

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Steiner, George 1929–

PERSONAL: Born April 23, 1929, in Paris, France; immigrated to the United States in 1940, naturalized citizen, 1944; son of Frederick George (a banker) and Elsie (Franzos) Steiner; married Zara Alice Shakow (a university professor), July 7, 1955; children: David Milton, Deborah Tarn. Education: University of Chicago, B.A., 1948; Harvard University, M.A., 1950; Oxford University, Ph.D., 1955. Hobbies and other interests: Mountain walking, music, chess.

ADDRESSES: Home—32 Barrow Rd., Cambridge CB2 2AS, England. Office—Churchill College, Cambridge, England.

CAREER: Economist, London, England, member of editorial staff, 1952–56; Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, fellow of Institute for Advanced Study, 1956–58, Gauss Lecturer, 1959–60; Cambridge University, Cambridge, England, fellow of Churchill College, 1961–69, Extraordinary Fellow, 1969–; University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland, professor of English and comparative literature, 1974–. Visiting professor at New York University, 1966–67, University of California, 1973–74, and at Harvard University, Yale University, Princeton University, College of France, and Stanford University; University of London, Maurice Lecturer, 1984; Cambridge University, Leslie Stephen Lecturer, 1985; University of Glasgow, W.P. Ker Lecturer, 1986, Gifford Lecturer, 1990; visiting professor College of France, 1992; Oxford University, First Lord Weidenfeld professor of comparative literature, 1994–.

MEMBER: English Association (president, 1975), Royal Society of Literature (fellow), British Academy (fellow), German Academy of Literature (corresponding member), Athenaeum Club (London), Savile Club (London), Harvard Club (New York, NY), American Academy of Arts and Sciences (honorary member).

AWARDS, HONORS: Bell Prize, 1950; Rhodes scholar, 1955; Fulbright professorship, 1958–59; O. Henry Short Story Prize, 1959; Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from National Institute of Arts and Letters, 1970; Guggenheim fellowship, 1971–72; Cortina Ulisse Prize, 1972; Remembrance Award, 1974, for The Language of Silence; PEN-Faulkner Award nomination, 1983, for The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H.; named Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur, 1984; Macmillan Silver Pen Award, 1992, for Proofs and Three Parables; PEN International Fiction Prize, 1993; Truman Capote Lifetime Award for Literature, 1999. Honorary degrees from colleges and universities, including D.Litt. degrees from Louvain University, 1980, Mount Holyoke College, 1983, University of Glasgow, 1990, University of Liege, 1990, University of Ulster, 1993, Durham University, 1995, Kenyon College, 1996, Trinity College, Dublin, 1996, University of Rome, 1998, and the Sorbonne, 1998.

WRITINGS:

Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism, Penguin (Harmondsworth, England), 1958, Dutton (New York, NY), 1971.

The Death of Tragedy, Hill & Wang (London, England), 1960, Knopf (New York, NY), 1961.

(Editor, with Robert Fagles) Homer: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1962.

Anno Domini: Three Stories, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1964.

(Editor and author of introduction) The Penguin Book of Modern Verse Translation, Penguin (Harmondsworth, England), 1966, published as Poem into Poem: World Poetry in Modern Verse Translation, 1970.

Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1967.

Extraterritorial: Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1971.

In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes toward the Redefinition of Culture, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1971.

Fields of Force: Fischer and Spassky in Reykjavik, Viking (New York, NY), 1973, published as The Sporting Scene: White Knights in Reykjavik, Faber (London, England), 1973.

Nostalgia for the Absolute, CBC Enterprises, 1974.

After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, Oxford University Press (Oxford, England), 1975, 3rd edition, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1998.

The Uncommon Reader, Bennington College Press (Bennington, VT), 1978.

On Difficulty and Other Essays, Oxford University Press (Oxford, England), 1978.

Martin Heidegger, Viking (New York, NY), 1978, published as Heidegger, Fontana (London, England), 1978.

The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H. (novel; also see below), Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1981, published with new afterword, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1999.

George Steiner: A Reader, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1984.

Antigones: How the Antigone Legend Has Endured in Western Literature, Art, and Thought, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1984.

Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1989.

Proofs and Three Parables (fiction), Viking (New York, NY), 1992.

What Is Comparative Literature?: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered before the University of Oxford on 11 October 1994, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1995.

No Passion Spent: Essays 1978–1995, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1996.

The Deeps of the Sea (fiction; contains The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H.), Faber (London, England), 1996.

(Editor and author of introduction and notes) Homer in English, Penguin (New York, NY), 1996.

(With Antoine Spire and others) Barbarie de l ignorance: Juste l ombre d un certain ennui, Bord de l'eau (Latresne, France), 1998.

Errata: An Examined Life, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1998.

(With Antoine Spire and others) Ce qui me hante, Bord de l'eau (Latresne, France), 1999.

Grammars of Creation: Originating in the Gifford Lectures for 1990, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2001.

Lessons of the Masters, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2003.

Author of introduction to The Trial, by Franz Kafka, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir, Schocken Books (New York, NY), 1995. Columnist and book reviewer for the New Yorker; contributor of essays, reviews, and articles to numerous periodicals, including Commentary, Harper's, and Nation. Author of works produced on audio cassette, including A Necessary Treason: The Poet and the Translator, J. Norton, 1970; and The Poet as Translator: To Traduce or Transfigure, J. Norton, 1970.

ADAPTATIONS: After Babel was adapted for television as The Tongues of Men, 1977. The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H. was adapted for the stage under the same title by Christopher Hampton, first produced in America at Hartford Stage, Hartford, CT, January 7, 1983.

SIDELIGHTS: "George Steiner is the most brilliant cultural journalist at present writing in English, or perhaps in any language," a Times Literary Supplement reviewer wrote. Steiner is known on two continents for his literary criticism and far-ranging essays on linguistics, ethics, translation, the fine arts, and science. According to Pearl K. Bell in the New Leader, few present-day literary critics "can match George Steiner in erudition and sweep. Actually, he resists confinement within the fields of literature, preferring more venturesome forays into the history of ideas…. Steiner has proceeded on the confident assumption that no activity of the human mind is in any way alien or inaccessible to his own." Steiner writes for the educated general reader rather than for the academic specialist; London Times contributor Philip Howard called the author "an intellectual who bestrides the boundaries of cultures and disciplines." In addition to his numerous books, including Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman and After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, Steiner produces regular columns for New Yorker magazine, where he serves primarily as a book reviewer. Almost always controversial for his bold assertions and assessments of highly specialized theories, Steiner "has been called both a mellifluous genius and an oversimplifying intellectual exhibitionist," to quote Curt Suplee in the Washington Post. National Review correspondent Scott Lahti claimed, however, that most readers appreciate Steiner's "provocative manner of expression … by turns richly allusive, metaphoric, intensely concerned, prophetic, apocalyptic—and almost always captivating."

Much of Steiner's criticism reflects his own sensitivity to the shaping events of modern history. "One way or another," noted a Times Literary Supplement reviewer, "in his view, the word has been pushed into a corner; non-verbal forms of discourse have taken over so many fields where writing once reigned supreme…. There is also the terrible cloud that has been cast over language and literature by the actions of a thoroughly literate and cultured people between 1933 and 1945," provoking a need for the critic "to expose all such dehumanization of the word." In the New Republic Theodore Solotaroff proposed that Steiner, himself a Jew who escaped France just before the Nazi atrocities descended, regards himself as heir to a European intellectual community that was annihilated by the Holocaust. Solotaroff suggested that Steiner stands "in a deep sense for the whole generation of his peers—these children who did not survive, who left this great tradition bereft of its natural proteges, who make such a haunting absence today in the life of the European mind…. There is a driving, obsessive quality to Steiner's acquisitiveness, a fever in his point of view which goes beyond curiosity and self-assertion." Indeed, one of Steiner's central preoccupations, discussed in both his fiction and his nonfiction, is the relation between high culture and barbarism—how, for instance, a concentration camp guard could enjoy a novel or a symphony after sending people to the gas chambers. Punch contributor Melvyn Bragg wrote: "The drive, the necessity, the fate which kept Sisyphus going has been, with Steiner, the Holocaust. In that blaze, he has written, not only did a people burn, but words turned to ashes, meaning and value were powdered to be ground into dirt by the heels of vacant inheritors." Steiner himself told the New York Times Book Review that central to everything he is and believes and has written "is my astonishment, naive as it seems to people, that you can use human speech both to bless, to love, to build, to forgive and also to torture, to hate, to destroy and to annihilate."

Rootlessness—or, as he puts it, extraterritoriality, also serves as a foundation for Steiner's essays on language and literature. Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Bruce Robbins saw in Steiner "the willed trace of a radical homelessness that he has made a personal motif for almost thirty years." Steiner was born in Paris to Viennese parents; he was only eleven when his family fled to the United States in 1940. Thus he grew up with a full command of three languages—English, French, and German—and his adult life has included extensive work on the nature and limitations of human communication. "The recent preoccupation of all thoughtful practitioners of the humanities with language is [Steiner's] preoccupation," observed David H. Stewart in the Western Humanities Review. "Semantics, semiotics, psycho-linguistics, structuralist literary criticism: these are his concerns. These he orchestrates into his continuing effort to explain how human beings communicate and what their manner of communication does to the content and style of their minds." In Book World, Richard Freedman contended that Steiner's interests have led him to investigate "the very roots of communication … how the special patterns of the some 4,000 languages now spoken in the world determine not only the course of the literature, but of the psychology, philosophy, and even the physiology of the people who speak and write them." As Malcolm Bradbury put it in the London Times, part of Steiner's appeal is that he "celebrates, and is, the great scholar-reader for whom endless reinterpretation of major ideas and myths is fundamental to existence. He becomes himself the case in point: native in three languages, read in many more, learned over a massive range, requiring of those who study or debate with him an unremitting dedication. All this is expressed with a charismatic power which makes even difficulty seem easy, and invites rebellion against low educational standards, intellectual simplifications, and false prophesy."

Steiner was educated on two continents, having studied at the University of Chicago, Harvard, and Oxford University on a Rhodes scholarship. His first book, published the year he turned thirty, concerns not English literature but the works of two great Russian writers, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Titled Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism, the book "announces the particular place Steiner has assigned himself," wrote Robbins. "Neither Europe nor America, his Russia is a no-man's-land that permits him to remain, to use his term, unhoused." In addition to offering an analysis of the two writers' lives, thoughts, and historical milieu, the work challenges the au courant "New Criticism" by assigning moral, philosophical, and historical worth to the texts. A Times Literary Supplement correspondent observed that Steiner "is concerned not with a catalogue of casual, incidental parallels between life and fiction but with the overmastering ideas which so preoccupied the two men that they could not help finding parallel expression in their lives and their works." Another Times Literary Supplement reviewer likewise declared that Steiner "feels he is addressing not professional scholars merely, safely shut in the confines of one particular discipline, but all thinking men who are aware of the larger world of social and political realities about them. Dr. Steiner's style derives part of its force from his seeing intellectual questions against the background of historical crises and catastrophes."

In 1967 Steiner published Language and Silence, a collection of essays that establish the author's "philosophy of language." The book explores in depth the vision of the humanely educated Nazi and the diminution of the word's vitality in an audio-visual era. Solotaroff maintained that Language and Silence "casts a bright and searching light into the murky disarray of current letters and literacy: it looks back to a darkness and disruption of Western culture that continues to plague and challenge the moral purpose of literature, among other fields, and it looks forward to possibilities of art and thought that may carry us beyond our broken heritage. It provides an articulate and comprehensive discussion of the impact of science and mass communications on the ability of language to describe the realities of the earth and the world." Steiner's conclusion—that silence and the refusal to write is the last-resort moral act in the face of bestiality—aroused conflicting opinions among his critics. In the New York Times Book Review, Robert Gorham Davis suggested that the author "displaces onto language many of his feelings about history and religion. He makes it an independent living organism which can be poisoned or killed." The critic added, however, that throughout the volume, "thoughts are expressed with such a fine and knowledgeable specificity that when we are forced to disagree with Steiner, we always know exactly upon what grounds. He teaches and enlightens even where he does not convince." New York Times contributor Eliot Fremont-Smith concluded that Language and Silence "will confirm, if confirmation is necessary, [Steiner's] reputation as one of the most erudite, resourceful and unrelentingly serious critics working today."

Many observers have argued that After Babel is Steiner's monumental work, a "deeply ambivalent hymn to language," as Geoffrey H. Hartman put it in the New York Times Book Review. The book offers a wide-ranging inquiry into the fields of linguistics and translation, with commentary on the vagaries of communication both inside and between languages. Washington Post Book World reviewer Peter Brunette explained that in After Babel Steiner proposes "the radical notion that the world's many diverse languages (4,000 plus, at last count) were created to disguise and hide things from outsiders, rather than to assist communication, as we often assume. A corollary is that the vast majority of our day-to-day language production is internal, and is not meant to communicate at all." In Listener, Hyam Maccoby contended that Steiner's predilection is for a view "that a language is the soul of a particular culture, and affects by its very syntax what can be said or thought in that culture; and that the differences between languages are more important than their similarities (which he calls 'deep but trivial')." The book brought Steiner into a debate with linguists such as Noam Chomsky, who are searching for the key to a "universal grammar" that all human beings share. Many critics felt that in After Babel Steiner presents a forceful challenge to the notion of an innate, universal grammar. According to Raymond Oliver in the Southern Review, the book "is dense but lucid and often graceful; its erudition is balanced by sharpness of insights, its theoretical intelligence by critical finesse; and it pleads the cause of poetry, language, and translation with impassioned eloquence…. We are ready to be sustained and delighted by the sumptuous literary feast [Steiner] has prepared us." New Yorker columnist Naomi Bliven likewise pointed out that Steiner's subject "is extravagantly rich, and he ponders it on the most generous scale, discussing how we use and misuse, understand and misunderstand words, and so, without always being aware of what we are doing, create art, history, nationality, and our sense of belonging to a civilization…. He is frequently ironic and witty, but for the most part his language and his ideas display even-handedness, seriousness without heaviness, learning without pedantry, and sober charm."

"Steiner's performance is mindful of a larger public," wrote Robbins. Not surprisingly, therefore, the author does not shy from forceful communication or controversial conclusions. For instance, in his novel The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H., Steiner gives readers an opportunity to ponder world history from Adolf Hitler's eloquent point of view. Some critics found the novel morally outrageous, while others cited it for its stimulating—if not necessarily laudable—ideas. Steiner's essays have also had their detractors. Bradbury suggested that his nonfiction has "a quality of onward-driving personal history, and it is not surprising that they have left many arguments in their wake." Bradbury added that Steiner's impact "in provoking British scholars to a much more internationalist and comparative viewpoint has been great, but not always gratefully received." Lahti, for one, found Steiner's conclusions "often fragmentary, and his frequent resort to extravagant assertions and perverse generalizations lessens the force of his arguments." Similarly, New York Review of Books contributor D.J. Enright faulted Steiner for "a histrionic habit, an overheated tone, a melodramatization of what (God knows) is often dramatic enough, a proclivity to fly to extreme positions. The effect is to antagonize the reader on the brink of assent."

Steiner's Proofs and Three Parables, a slim collection of short fiction, received Britain's MacMillan Silver Pen Award. Reviewers praised the book, noting its function as an engagingly readable introduction to some of Steiner's philosophical ideas. The short story "Proofs," for example, features "a sustained and often hilarious debate between [a proof-reader who is a former member of the Italian Communist party] and his old friend, Father Carlo Tessone, on the meaning of life in a post-communist world," summarized David Lohrey in Los Angeles Times Book Review. Lohrey concluded that Steiner articulates "the superfluousness of the individual in our time and one's increasing belief that this world no longer cares for the distinction between things done well and those merely completed." The volume also contains three parables, "Desert Island Disks," "Noel, Noel," and "Conversation Piece," all of which use unusual symbolism and playful dialogue to articulate Steiner's philosophical ruminations concerning culture, history, and philosophy.

In Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?, Steiner "offers a dark picture of contemporary Western culture," according to Michael F. Suarez in Review of English Studies. Steiner argues in the volume for a return to the "transcendent" potential of art which, he believes, has been undermined by the post-modern concern with deconstruction of artistic "texts" and constant awareness of the "intertextuality" of all art forms. In other words, he deems the postmodern view of art as a series of "signs," a destructive force that has contributed to the essential irrelevance of art in the modern world. "A [method of] criticism, then, that does not assume that it can transcend itself—let alone its object—is not real, and deconstruction is, par excellence, such a criticism," commented Richard Cavell in Canadian Literature. "Only art, for Steiner, can answer to art."

In No Passion Spent Steiner presents a volume of essays on a variety of religious, philosophical, linguistic, and literary subjects. He explores the decline of literacy and serious reading in western civilization and searches for the source of philosophical divisions in human thought that have contributed to destructive tendencies throughout history. Central to several of his essays is the history of Judaism and the adversarial relationship between the Jewish faith and Christianity. "In No Passion Spent, Steiner faces his divine source and drinks from the Bible, Homer and Socrates, Jesus, Freud and Shakespeare, as well as Kafka, Kierkegaard, Husserl and Simone Weil," noted Guymannes-Abbott in New Statesman & Society. Spectator contributor Tony Connor found Steiner's rhetoric "exhilarating," but complained that "too much of [Steiner's writing] is only interesting if one is interested in Steiner; too much of his commentary on writers serves only to direct the reader back to the authoritative and grandly dispensing figure of the critic."

Critics praised Steiner's collection of short fiction, The Deeps of the Sea, also published in 1996. The volume includes Steiner's acclaimed novel, The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H., along with several shorter works. Connor found Steiner's stories "better, on the whole, when they come closer to parables, and when they are interesting it is because of the ideas they contain."

Errata: An Examined Life is a series of essays, "primarily a tour of ideas, not of places or people," to quote Anthony Gottlieb in the New York Times Book Review. While drawing anecdotes from his own life, Steiner primarily searches for "occasions for reflection on the intellectual world and his position in it," Gottlieb remarked. Among the other topics upon which he touches are the current status of so-called "classic" art and literature, the Jewish diaspora, Judeo-Christian morality and its impact on the twentieth century, and the pitfalls of computer translation. In Review of Contemporary Fiction Thomas Hove concluded that few of Steiner's peers in the critical canon "can match the bravado of his evaluative and impressionistic formulations, and even fewer can convey … so many dimensions of response to linguistic and artistic expression." A Publishers Weekly contributor praised Errata as "an intimate and captivating glimpse into Steiner's mind and thought."

A great deal of debate attended the publication of Grammars of Creation, a book based on Steiner's Gifford Lectures at the University of Glasgow. The work defies easy summarization, but it studies in depth the evolution of grammar and language in an era of atheism and postmodernism. Once again he focuses on the Holocaust and its moral and intellectual effects upon language, and he debates the future of artistic creativity in an era of rising narcissism and admiration of scientific progress. According to a critic for the online Independent, Steiner seeks "to discover how to shape the legacy of language so that it is capable of yielding fresh meaning. In Grammars of Creation, he argues that what is required is nothing less than a new 'grammar' of creativity, a new set of rules, to articulate the riches of language in freshly constructive ways that match the ethos and beliefs of our complex, anxious, information-overloaded world."

National Review correspondent Michael Potemra called Grammars of Creation "an intellectual tour de force," and Jeffrey Snowbarger in Booklist likewise deemed it "the high point of a lengthy and productive career." In the Times Literary Supplement, Peter D. Smith commented: "Steiner's account of artistic creation in Grammars of Creation … is deeply felt and powerful. The description of how writers create characters by breathing 'a dynamic, intrusive and unforgettable élan vital into a constellation of words and action' is one among many memorable insights. His perceptive readings of Dante and the Shoah poet, Paul Celan, are typical of a work in which the author's erudition is matched only by his eloquence." A Publishers Weekly reviewer contended that readers of the work would be "dazzled by a learning and an elegance that, in the minds of others less fatalistic, may yet prove redemptive." And John Kennedy in the Antioch Review declared: "In this essential text, Steiner is a virtuoso, a fully armed witness to past and present ideas of creation in Western culture."

Reviewers have commonly observed that Steiner intends to challenge his audience, deliberately provoking strong opinions. In the New Republic, Robert Boyers wrote: "Readers will sense, on every page, an invitation to respond, to argue, to resist. But so nimble and alert to possibility is the critic's articulating voice that one will rather pay careful attention than resist. Ultimately, no doubt, 'collaborative disagreement' may seem possible, but few will feel dismissive or ungrateful…. No reader will fail to feel Steiner's encouragement as he moves out on his own." According to Edward W. Said in Nation, Steiner "is that rare thing, a critic propelled by diverse enthusiasms, a man able to understand the implications of trends in different fields, an autodidact for whom no subject is too arcane. Yet Steiner is to be read for his quirks, rather than in spite of them. He does not peddle a system nor a set of norms by which all things can be managed, every text decoded. He writes to be understood by nonspecialists, and his terms of reference come from his experience—which is trilingual, eccentric and highly urbane—not from something as stable as doctrine or authority." Bradbury stated that what can always be said of Steiner "is that what he questions and quarrels with, he reads and knows. And, whatever the quarrels, Steiner is a major figure, who has sustained a profoundly enquiring philosophy of literature." Fremont-Smith expressed a similar opinion. "Whether or not one agrees with Mr. Steiner's analyses," the reviewer concluded, "he does set one thinking, and thinking, moreover, about issues that are paramount."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 24, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1983.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 67: American Critics since 1955, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1988.

Scott, Nathan A., and Ronald A. Sharp, editors, Reading George Steiner, Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, MD), 1994.

PERIODICALS

Antioch Review, winter, 2002, John Kennedy, review of Grammars of Creation, p. 161.

Booklist, April 1, 2001, Jeffrey Snowbarger, review of Grammars of Creation, p. 1430.

Book World, January 2, 1972.

Canadian Literature, spring, 1995, p. 193.

Christian Science Monitor, May 25, 1975.

Commentary, October, 1968; November, 1975.

Commonweal, May 12, 1961; October 27, 1967.

Contemporary Review, January, 2002, Geoffrey Heptonstall, "George Steiner's Passionate Reason," p. 54.

Detroit News, April 25, 1982.

Library Journal, September 15, 2003, William D. Walsh, review of Lessons of the Masters, p. 59.

Listener, April 27, 1972; January 30, 1975; March 22, 1979; July 3, 1980.

London Magazine, December, 1967.

Los Angeles Times, October 23, 1980; June 6, 1993, p. 8.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 11, 1982; November 18, 1984.

Modern Language Review, January, 1987, p. 158.

Nation, March 2, 1985.

National Review, December 31, 1971; August 31, 1979; June 11, 1982; July 26, 1985; May 28, 2001, Michael Potemra, "Shelf Life."

New Leader, June 23, 1975.

New Republic, May 13, 1967; January 27, 1979; May 12, 1979; April 21, 1982; November 19, 1984.

New Statesman, November 17, 1961; October 20, 1967; October 22, 1971; January 31, 1975; December 1, 1978; June 27, 1980; January 5, 1996, p. 37; March 1, 1996, p. 36.

Newsweek, April 26, 1982; January 5, 1996, p. 37.

New Yorker, January 30, 1965; May 5, 1975.

New York Review of Books, October 12, 1967; November 18, 1971; October 30, 1975; April 19, 1979; August 12, 1982; December 6, 1984.

New York Times, March 20, 1967; June 22, 1971; July 1, 1974; May 7, 1975; April 16, 1982; January 7, 1983; April 1, 1993, p. C21; June 27, 1996, p. B5.

New York Times Book Review, May 28, 1967; August 1, 1971; October 13, 1974; June 8, 1975; January 21, 1979; May 2, 1982; December 16, 1984; June 30, 1996, p. 16; April 12, 1998, Anthony Gottlieb, "Idea Man," p. 18; September 2, 2001, Roger Kimball, "Is the Future Just a Tense?," p. 12.

Observer, December 17, 1978; March 28, 1993, p. 7; June 30, 1996, p. 16.

Publishers Weekly, January 19, 1998, review of Errata: An Examined Life, p. 360; March 19, 2001, review of Grammars of Creation, p. 86.

Punch, June 17, 1981.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, spring, 1998, Thomas Hove, review of Errata, p. 206.

Southern Review, winter, 1978. Spectator, April, 1960; December 2, 1978; July 19, 1980; January 13, 1996, p. 29.

Time, July 26, 1971; March 29, 1982.

Times (London, England), March 20, 1982; June 23, 1984; June 28, 1984.

Times Literary Supplement, March 11, 1960; September 28, 1967; December 17, 1971; May 19, 1972; May 18, 1973; January 31, 1975; November 17, 1978; June 12, 1981; April 6, 2001, Peter D. Smith, "The Wingbeat of the Unknown," p. 13.

Voice Literary Supplement, April, 1982; December, 1984.

Washington Post, May 13, 1982.

Washington Post Book World, January 14, 1979; May 2, 1982; December 30, 1984; January 19, 1986; June 23, 1996, p. 11.

Western Humanities Review, autumn, 1979.

Yale Review, autumn, 1967.